


Dear Clay Jensen

by ScribbleWiggy



Category: 13 Reasons Why (TV), Dear Evan Hansen - Pasek & Paul/Levenson
Genre: F/M, M/M, SO SORRY, all the major characters are sort of reflective of characters from dear evan hansen, everyone is out of character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-22
Updated: 2017-08-26
Packaged: 2018-12-18 18:42:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 12
Words: 26,340
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11880507
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ScribbleWiggy/pseuds/ScribbleWiggy
Summary: It's Dear Evan Hansen in the 13 Reasons Why universe. Read to find out more.I don't own any of these ideas. It all belongs to... the original creators, who I'd list, but I think everyone knows, so, just know that all this is theirs, and I just combined two things together so I could stop having day dreams about it and move on with my life.





	1. Anybody Have a Map?/Waving Through a Window

**Author's Note:**

> I had to write this thing because I couldn't listen to the cast recording without imagining it like this and... it just got weird. So sorry.

Clay gazed down at his partially drunk, lukewarm Americano, and considered finishing it. He didn't particularly want to waste it, but he knew it wasn't going to taste good anymore. He didn't really want to drink coffee as a whole, anymore, either; considering how little sleep he'd been getting. The less coffee he drank, the more likely it was that he’d be able to get some sleep.

So, with a sigh, he pushed the half filled cup away from him and dropped his head to his arms instead.

It seemed like every choice he made nowadays had to be made through a process similar to that one. He didn't let himself do anything without thinking about the pros and cons of each decision. The choice not to finish his coffee hadn't needed such a long thought process, and yet, there it was.

“Clay!”

He lifted his head, and watched as Tony came traipsing over to his table. He quickly reached for his coffee and pretended to finish it in order to have something to do. Sitting down across from him, Tony reached out with his foot and gently nudged Clay’s shin.

“What's up?” he asked, smiling.

“Oh, not much,” Clay replied, not looking at him. “Just trying to wake up before I bike to school.”

Tony glanced at the half finished coffee. “Did you get any sleep last night?”

“No,” Clay admitted after strongly considering lying instead.

“You've been here every morning for the past month,” Tony said, and Clay glanced at him in surprise. “I've seen your bike outside.” Tony tilted his head. “What's going on?”

Clay lifted his shoulders. “Just… haven't been able to sleep. I don't know.” And currently, the reason why was sitting across from him, but he couldn't say that out loud. 

Tony waited a moment for him to say more, and when he didn't, said, “Have you been doing that thing I suggested?”

“What thing?”

“The letters to yourself.” Tony held up his hands, like he was framing a marquee. “ _Dear Clay Jensen, today is gonna be a good day, and here’s why._ ”

Clay rolled his eyes. “You were being serious?”

“Yes,” Tony responded earnestly. “It helps. I read about it.”

“In _The Enquirer_?”

“In a medical journal,” Tony retorted. “It was in the waiting room of your therapist’s office. I figure if you won't go to her, I'll have to do her job.” He leaned back in his chair. “I just want you to try and be optimistic. Every time I see you, you look like you think the world’s about to fall apart.”

Clay didn't respond, and Tony nudged him beneath the table again. “Maybe you can stop giving up so quickly? Y’know, go for things, and actually keep going for them?”

“Yeah, sure,” Clay sighed.

Tony grinned. “Good. C’mon, I'll drive you the rest of the way.”

He let clay lead the way out of Monet’s and helped him put his bike in the Mustang’s trunk. All the while, he kept an eye on him.

Tony may like to act as though he knows what he’s talking about, but if he were to be honest, he felt like he never had the right thing to say. And when he was trying to speak to Clay… it just got worse.

He wanted a map. He needed someone to tell him how to do this, because he was honestly just pretending like he knew. He was going in blind, and making up everything as he went.

And that wasn’t going to keep working in the long run.

They drove to Liberty in silence, the tape TOny had in the player quiet in the background. When they reached the school, it was to a full parking lot, hundreds of kids milling about and wasting time before the first bell.

Clay started to get out of the car even before Tony had turned it off, but he reached over and grabbed  Clay’s arm.

“What?” Clay asked, glancing back at him.

“ _Dear Clay Jensen_ ,” Tony started, “ _today is gonna be a good day, and here’s why: you have the best friend anyone could ask for, because he cares about you, a lot_.”

He didn’t let go of Clay’s arm until his friend offered him a smile. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

“That’s all I ask,” Tony said, and let him go. “See you later.”

Clay nodded, and climbed from the car. Tony watched through the rearview mirror as he retrieved his bike and pushed it away, before sighing to himself and settling back against the seat.

Once he had chained up his bike, Clay headed into the school, seeing no reason to stand outside, since he had no one to talk to.

“Hey, Clay.”

Forcing a smile, Clay paused in front of his locker and turned to the kid who’d called his name. “Hey, Jeff. What’s up?”

“Oh, not much, y’know.” Jeff nudged him. “How was your weekend?”

“Not bad,” Clay answered with a shrug. “I didn’t do much.”

“Oh. Well, I went to the batting cages,” Jeff said. “Batting 150 now. Impressive, I know,” he said before Clay could speak. “Hey, you should come with me some time.”

“Uh, no, I don’t really -”

“Oh, shit,” Jeff said, looking past him. “There’s Alex. I gotta talk to him about our History project, but hey!” He looked at Clay again, and gave him finger guns. “Hit me up, and we’ll go hit some balls sometime, all right?”

“I don’t think -”

“Alex, wait up!” Jeff called down the hall. “See ya, Clay.”

Clay turned and watched Jeff disappear into the growing crowd of students. Sighing to himself, he turned to his locker and started to turn the dial.

“Is it weird to be the first person to be ignored while trying to _turn down_ an offer to hang out, or do you consider that an accomplishment?”

Clay yanked his locker open. “Hi, Skye.”

Skye eyed him as he retrieved his math book from his locker. “So, I guess my idea about you liking Jeff was wrong, huh?” she asked. “‘Cause, Clay, he’s fuckin’ hot, and even I wouldn’t turn down the opportunity to see him ‘hit some balls’.”

“That’s not funny,” Clay muttered, “and I asked you not to talk about that kind of thing in the middle of the hallway anymore, remember?”

“Uh-huh, yeah.” Skye tilted her head. “I saw you climbing out of Tony’s car earlier. Did he try to give you another pep talk?”

“Sort of?” Clay scratched the back of his head. “I dunno. It was weird, because he sort of did it when he found me at Monet’s earlier, and he tried to talk me into writing one of those letters, y’know? And I expected him to keep talking about them the whole way to school, but he didn't. We just sat in silence.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, and then, when we got to school, I started to get out of the car, but he grabbed my arm and kind of looked at me funny before giving me a start to a letter, like a template, sort of,” Clay finished.

Skype gazed at him for a moment: “Tony’s so weird,” she decided, and then she started to walk away.

“Uhm, hey!” Clay called, and she paused, glancing back at him. “How was your weekend?”

“Why're you asking?”

“‘C-cause we’re friends.”

“Uh… no,” Skye said. “We’re not. We were, once, but then high school started, and now no one is friends with anyone.” She shook her head at him. “We’re just all trying to survive.” Her eyes drifted past him. “Oh, hey, Hannah. What the hell did you do to your hair?”

Clay turned in time to see Hannah Baker reach up to touch her newly shorn hair. “I just wanted a change,” she explained.

“Well, you went for a big one,” Skye said, and then she, too, disappeared into the crowd.

Clay smiled to himself, and Hannah looked at him. “What are you laughing about? You think my haircut’s bad?” she demanded.

“No!” Clay said, quickly, stunned that she'd immediately jumped to that conclusion.

“You think I should've kept it the way it was?” Hannah persisted.

“I didn't -”

“You have no right to laugh at me!” Hannah shouted, and then she shook her head, eyes filled with tears. “I thought that, at least you, wouldn't have anything bad to say about it.”

She stalked past him, vanishing as well, and Clay exhaled, pressing his forehead against his locker.

 _You should've slammed the breaks, Clay_ , he thought, _before you made that mistake._

He usually tried to stay out of it all, stick to the sidelines, but apparently that was already not working out for him, today.

 _Guess I gotta get out of the sun, before it gets worse_ , he decided, and then he moved into the crowd and started to make his way towards his math class.

As he walked, he saw Jessica and Justin making out against one wall, and Zach and Marcus discussing something outside the bathroom, both deeply into the conversation.

Clay knew that he'd never be able to casually suck face with his significant other in the hallway, but he sometimes wished that he could talk to a friend without fear of being interrupted, or ignored entirely.

It just seemed like, whenever he tried to speak up, no one was listening, and he couldn't do anything but wait around for an answer to his problems to appear.

He wished that anyone would give him a sign that they were paying attention to him.

“Hey, are you okay?” Tony suddenly appeared directly in front of him, blocking his way into class. “I saw what happened with Hannah. I'm sorry she overreacted; she can be like that, sometimes.”

“Oh, yeah, no, it's fine. I'm fine, she's probably not fine, but I don't know where she went, so I can't apologize or anything,” Clay said.

Tony frowned. “Why would you apologize? You didn't do anything.”

“Yeah, I know,” Clay replied, “but she was really upset, so I feel like I should?”

Tony stared at him for a moment. “You're sure you're okay?”

“Yeah, I am. Totally,” Clay said.

“Okay,” Tony responded. “Well… see you.”

“Doyouwannagetcoffee?” Clay blurted, and Tony stopped turning to leave.

“What?”

“What'd you say?”

Tony smiled. “I didn't. You said something.”

“Me? No way…” Clay scratched the back of his neck. “... Jose.”

“My name’s Tony.”

Clay blanched. “It… joke.”

Tony’s grin grew. “I know. Later.”

He walked away, and Clay winced. He'd completely forgotten Tony. Tony, who made him feel important, like he belonged, but he couldn't even ask him to coffee the right way, so there went that plan.

He really needed to just stop trying, because not even Tony could save him from messing up when talk _to_ Tony.

After a _long_ day at school, Clay was waiting in the hallway for his mother, who’d told him she'd be picking him up, when his phone rang.

Not surprised to see his mother’s name on the screen, Clay answered the call. “Hello?”

“Hey, honey. Sorry. I know I said I'd pick you up, but I… I just have so much work to do.”

“It's okay.”

“I’d send your dad, but he has a night class -”

“I know,” Clay said. “Really, Mom, it's fine. I’ll just ride my bike home, like I do everyday.”

His mother was quiet on the other end of the call for a moment. “All right. Have you written one of those letters that Tony suggested?”

“I started one, yeah,” Clay answered, thinking of the beginning Tony had given him earlier on that day. “I’m finishing it up in the library right now.”

“Good,” his mother replied, and Clay could hear her smile. “And you had a good day?”

Clay closed his eyes as he started to make his way towards the library. “Yeah, Mom,” he said. “It was good.”

“Good,” Lainie said. “Okay, honey, I'll see you tonight. Ride home safe. I love you.”

“You too,” Clay responded, and then he lowered his phone and hung up the call as he pushed his way into the library. “Project,” he explained to the librarian, and he heard over to the computer desks.

He pulled up a new Word document after logging in and typed _Dear Clay Jensen…_

And, almost as though those words had unlocked something, more just started to pour out of him into the keyboard, and onto the screen.

_Turns out today wasn't so great after all. I talked to three people, and managed to mess up all three conversations, even before talking to Tony, who always makes conversation even harder, even though he tries to make them easier._

_And, yeah, you might think tomorrow will be better, because I still have Tony. All my hope is currently invested in Tony, because he's the most real person in my life, and he’s the only one who actually talks and listens to me, but it's so hard to talk to him, because he's Tony and I love him._

_Maybe if I could actually have a normal conversation with him, I’d feel better. I'd feel better if I could have a normal conversation with anybody, actually, but no one ever seems to want to have a normal conversation with me. No one seems to listen to me, aside from Tony, and I can't even talk to Tony, so it's like there's really no upside to this._

_I wish that… that one other person would listen, or at least pretend to, because then, maybe, I wouldn't feel like no one would care if I just… disappeared._

_Sincerely, Your Best Friend,_

_Me_

“Hey.”

Clay jumped, and turned to see Hannah standing next to his desk.

“Oh, uh, hey,” he said, clearing his throat.

“Listen, I'm sorry about earlier,” she began. “PMSing, you know?”

“Right, it's okay,” Clay told her. “I'm sorry for…”

“You didn't do anything,” Hannah said, and Clay nodded, then looked down at his hands. “What're you writing?”

Clay’s head shoup, and he started to stammer out an answer and retrieve the mouse in order to close the window, but Hannah had already moved in and was reading the letter.

“ _I love Tony_ ,” Hannah read, and she glanced at him. “Tony Padilla?”

“This… isn't anything,” Clay said quickly. “Just, random shit, you know, trying to clear my head.”

“Dude, you should tell him this stuff,” Hannah said. “Really.”

Before Clay could argue, she’d sent the document to the printer and was retrieving it.

“I don't want him to know,” Clay said, picking up his backpack and hurrying over to her. “Really, I don't. It's too weird.”

Hannah glanced at him. “It might make you feel better if you knew he knew,” she said. “If you won't give it to him, I will.”

“No, no, Hannah, don’t, please!” Clay begged, radon after her out of the library.

Before he could catch up to her, however, he saw her get cornered by Montgomery de la Cruz, and he stopped.

“What's this?” Montgomery queried, plucking the letter from her hands.

“That's not yours, Monty. Give it back,” Hannah tried, grabbing for it.

“Holy shit!” Montgomery exclaimed, holding it away from her. “This is deep shit!” He pulled out his phone and snapped several pictures of the letter, cackling. “It is getting sent all over the school. Hannah Baker, in love with Tony Padilla, who just so happens to be gay!”

Hannah didn't even try to stop him once he had the pictures, and Clay heard the distinct noise of a message being sent even from where he was down the hall. Month handed the letter back to Hannah, who took it without blinking.

“You're never gonna be able to live this one down, babe,” he told her, and then he sauntered away, still chortling to himself.

Clay watched as Hannah slowly folded up the letter and put it on her pocket. She then ran out of the school, leaving Clay standing outside of the library, and wondering what the hell he was supposed to do.


	2. For Forever

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's the stuff before For Forever and then the song, but not actually the song because this is written word not a performance on a stage.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Still don't own anything.

~*~

~*~

~*~

~*~

“Clay, you’re wanted in Mr. Porter’s office.” 

Clay blinked at Mr. Jones, who was currently blocking the way into his math classroom. “Why?” 

“Just go to the office, son,” Jones answered. 

Clay hitched his backpack higher onto his shoulders, and turned around to head to the front office. As he walked, the bell rang, signalling the start of first period. The halls were empty. It was weird to see them like that, when usually they were overflowing with students. 

Clay walked into the office to the sound of a ringing telephone. He smiled weakly at the front desk secretary, and headed for the offices. He knocked on Mr. Porter’s door before opening it, and found two adults are seated inside, a man and a woman, facing not the desk, but a third chair. 

“Good morning,” Clay managed. “Is… is Mr. Porter…?” He took a closer look at the adults expressions, and quickly backtracked. “I-I’m sorry. My teacher said Mr. Porter wanted to see me, so -”

“Mr. Porter stepped out,” the man said, rising from his chair. 

Clay took a step back. “Oh.”

“We wanted to speak with you in private,” the man explained. 

Clay glanced between him and the woman, who was searching for something in the purse that sat on the floor at her feet. 

“Sit down, if you’d like,” the man invited, indicating the third chair. 

Clay took the seat, sitting sideways, and he pulled his backpack off and set it on the floor, before glancing between the two of them again. 

“We’re, uh… we’re Hannah’s parents,” the man told him. 

“Oh,” Clay said, quietly. He was beginning to think he understood what this was about. 

“Why don’t you -” Mr. Baker started, turning to wife, who held up a hand. 

“I’m going as fast as I can,” she said. 

“I wasn’t trying to make you move quicker,” Mr. Baker sighed, and then he sat back in his chair. 

Mrs. Baker inhaled, and then handed Clay the piece of paper she’d retrieved from her purse. “I think Hannah wanted you to have this, although… it might be that you’ve already seen it,” she said. 

A glance down at the paper revealed that he was holding his letter, and Clay swallowed. “Uh -”

“She never mentioned you,” Mr. Baker said, cutting him off before he could form a single word of explanation. “But we found this, and we went through her phone, and found texts from you, apologizing for it.” He gestured to the letter. “ _ Dear Clay Jensen _ . That’s you.”

“She… gave this to you?” Clay asked, unable to look up from the letter. 

“We didn’t know you two were friends,” Mr. Baker went on. 

“F-friends?” Clay stammered, finally looking up. 

“We weren't’ sure that Hannah had  _ any  _ friends,” Mr. Baker said. “And then we see this, and… even though we’re not sure how it already got around the school… it seems to suggest that she trusted you. A lot.” He gestured to the letter again. “It’s right there, addressed to you. She trusted you enough to tell you all this personal stuff.”

“You… you think that Hannah… wrote this to me?” Clay clarified. 

“These are things she only wanted you to see,” Mrs. Baker said, finally speaking up. 

“Her last words,” Mr. Baker inserted. 

“She wanted only you to see them, and yet they somehow ended up all over social media.”

“I - I’m sorry…” Clay started, his heart thudding painfully in his chest. “What do you mean, ‘last words’?”

The Bakers exchanged a glance. Mrs. Baker shook her head, her eyes closing, tightly, and Mr. Baker turned back to Clay. 

“Hannah… Hannah took her own life, last night,” he managed, his voice cracking.

“She what?” Clay asked, bleakly. 

“And this was what she had with her, in the bathroom,” Mr. Baker added, nodding to the letter. “It’s… it’s her last letter, to you. And… she was clearly really unhappy… she wanted you to know, maybe to help you understand why she did what she did.”

Mrs. Baker let out a sob, and Clay struggled to find something, anything, to say. 

“I… I’m sorry, but this isn’t… Hannah didn’t write this,” he said, the letter shaking in his hands. 

“What does that mean?” Mrs. Baker asked, wiping at her eyes and looking at him. 

“Hannah. She didn’t… she didn’t write this,” Clay repeated, avoiding her gaze. 

“What does he mean?” Mrs. Baker demanded, turning to her husband. 

“He’s obviously just in shock,” Mr. Baker responded. 

“No!” Clay said, quickly. “It’s just - she didn’t -”

“It’s right here!” Mrs. Baker exclaimed, rising from her chair.

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, but I really need to go no,” Clay said, standing as well and pulling on his backpack. “Please…”

“She wrote that letter, and addressed it to you!” Mrs. Baker said over his protests. “She wanted you to have it, and somehow it got to everyone, and I want to know why! I want to know why she trusted you more than she trusted us!”

“Please,” Clay said, weakly. 

“Olivia,” Mr. Baker began, intervening. 

“This is all we have!” Mrs. Baker shouted at her husband. “And I don’t understand why he’s - don’t touch me!” She shoved Mr. Baker away, and put her hands to her face. 

Clay leaned around Mr. Baker, trying to hand over the letter. “Y-you should keep it,” he said, feeling like if he could offer some comfort, if could be this. If they thought it was Hannah’s last words, who was he to take that from them? “Please.”

Mrs. Baker lowered her hands and took the letter. “Why… why is the letter everywhere?” she asked. 

“Some - someone took it from her, when she printed it to give it to me, I think,” Clay murmured. “They thought it was funny, because… because the Tony she mentions is gay.”

“So… so you didn’t release it?” Mrs. Baker asked, softly.

“No!” Clay exclaimed. “No, I… I would never do something like that.”

Hannah’s parents exchanged another look, and then Mrs. Baker let out a breath. “I’m sorry, for attacking you like that,” she said. “You’re probably just as upset as we are.”

“Y-yeah,” Clay replied, wincing. “I… I honestly had no idea she was… so upset.”

“Woudl you maybe like to come to dinner, one night?” she offered. “We’d like to get to know you, since you meant so much to Hannah.”

“Oh, uhm…” Clay didn’t know what choice he had. “Sure. I’d like that.”

“How about next Wednesday, then?” Mr. Baker supplied. “Seven?”

“Yeah, okay,” Clay replied, and then he walked blindly out of Mr. Porter’s office, not sure how he should feel. 

~*~

  


~*~

~*~

~*~

~*~

The entire dinner was awkward. Tony was there, like he said he would be, and he kept glancing sideways at Clay, who busied himself with anything and everything in order to avoid eye contact. 

Currently, he was taking a rather long drink of his water, while Mrs. Baker was off in the kitchen, and Mr. Baker was wiping his mouth with his napkin. Tony, who hadn’t eaten much of his meal, continued to pick at it while staring at Clay. 

“Would anybody like more spaghetti?” Mr. Baker offered as Mrs. Baker came back into the dining room. 

“No thank you, sir,” Tony answered, finally looking away, which allowed Clay to stop drinking his water and set his cup down on the table again. 

Mrs. Baker was standing off to the side, watching him. Cautiously, she approached him, and asked, “Did Hannah tell you about the Jeffersons?” 

Clay immediately bobbed his head up and down in agreement. “We used to go up to Northern California, and go skiing together,” Mrs. Baker went on. 

Clay nodded again, glancing to see if Mr. Baker was paying attention. “Hannah hated skiing.”

“No, she didn’t,” Tony said. “She loved it, because of the snow.”

“Right!” Clay said, quickly, looking down. “Inmeant that… that she hated that I talked about how much  _ I  _ hate skiing.”

He hadn’t known this, but Tony and Hannah had actually been really close friends, which was why her parents hadn’t been surprised by the part about loving Tony that had been in the letter. They just assumed that Hannah hadn’t realized Tony was gay, because they hadn’t, either. 

Clay didn’t blame them. Tony had had to tell Clay he was gay, when Clay caught him on a date with another guy. That conversation had been just as awkward as this dinner. 

“So… you and Hannah hung out a lot?” Mrs. Baker questioned, picking up her wine glass from the other side of the table. 

“Of course,” Clay answered nervously. 

“Where?” Tony questioned, setting down his fork at last. 

Clay’s eyes darted over to him, and then he looked around at Hannah’s parents. Both of them were watching him, waiting. “You mean, where did we hang out? Well… it was mostly at, uh, at my house, and sometimes we’d come… uh, here, if no one else was home. Mostly we just emailed, though. Hannah liked emails.”

He took another nervous sip of his water in order to clear his throat. “Hannah didn’t always want to hang out with me in person, because I’m not the coolest guy to be around, and she was… sort of already picked on at school.” He shot another glance at Tony, before looking at Mrs. Baker. “She said that being seen with me would just make it worse, but she liked talking to me, so we emailed, mostly.”

Tony looked at Mrs. Baker as well. “Didn’t you say you looked through Hannah’s emails and texts? Were there any from Clay?”

“Just texts, mostly,” Mrs. Baker responded, looking at Clay in confusion. 

“Oh, yeah, no, that makes sense,” Clay said, nodding. “Yeah, uh, she had a different account that she used when emailing me.”

“Why’s that?” Tony asked, frowning at him. 

“Because she didn’t want anyone else seeing them,” Clay replied, reaching for his water again. 

“I knew that reading her emails wasn’t a good idea,” Mr. Baker sighed. 

“She was being evasive. I wanted to know what was wrong!” Mrs. Baker retorted. 

A silence fell over the table, and Clay finished off his water. 

“The weird thing is, I was with Hannah a lot, and she never mentioned you, once. I never saw you with her, except for when she yelled at you on Monday, at school,” Tony commented. 

“She yelled at you?” Mrs. Baker asked, eyes wide. 

“It was nothing,” Clay told her immediately. “She apologized, later, and said that it was just because she was, uhm, PMSing,” he finished, with an apologetic glance at Mr. Baker. “She thought I was laughing at her haircut, but I wasn’t. My other friend, Skye, she’d made a joke, and I was just smiling about it, that’s all. Hannah took it the wrong way, I guess.”

“She… did have a way of overreacting,” Mrs. Baker sighed after a moment. 

“Only sometimes,” Tony defended of Hannah, looking at Clay again. “When she thought she had a reason to.”

Mrs. Baker exhaled, and moved around the table to take her seat again. She rested her forehead in her hand. “I just wish I’d known more about what she was going through.”

“Well, you know, she was pretty good at hiding what she was feeling,” Clay said, which caused all three of them to look at him. He nodded. “I mean, she had a way of starting a conversation that made you think she was doing just fine, which… which is why I didn’t really know what she was thinking, sometimes. I just thought I did.”

“W-what did you talk about?” Mr. Baker asked. 

“A lot of things,” Clay replied. “Everything? There… there wasn’t a lot Hannah hid from me, except maybe what she was actually thinking about, but only sometimes.”

“And when she wasn’t?” Tony asked. “When she wasn’t hiding her feelings from you? What did you talk about, then?”

Clay looked at him, and saw the expression on his face. Immediately, he wished that he didn’t have a tongue, so that he wouldn’t be able to keep speaking. He glanced down at his partially filled plate. “Nothing, never mind,” he said. “I shouldn’t have -”

“No, we want to hear,” Mrs. Baker said, reaching across the table to put her hand over his. Clay looked up, and met her eyes. They were tear-brimmed, but she was offering him a watery smile. “Please, tell us.”

“Well… uhm… Hannah and I, we…” Clay trailed off, and struggled for something to say. “We had this really great day, recently, and it’s what I keep thinking about, in order to keep from being sad, that day at the… at the…” He looked around, and caught sight of the DVD rack in the living room. “At the… movies. The movies… place.”

“You mean the theatre? The Crestmont?” Mrs. Baker questioned, and Clay looked up in surprise. 

He nodded, rapidly. “Yes, the Crestmont! That’s… that’s where we went.”

“When?” Mrs. Baker asked. 

“Oh, uh, we went there a lot,” Clay replied. “I have a job there, and she liked to… to hang out with me. We’d climb onto the roof, or sit… sit behind it, in the alley, so no one would see us, y’know?”

“Hannah loved going to the movies when she was little,” Mr. Baker said, “didn’t she?”

Mrs. Baker nodded. “Yes, and she was upset when they didn’t hire her on at the Crestmont, but she did say that she would keep going there, anyway.” She looked at Tony. “Didn’t you go see a movie with her, once?”

“Yeah,” Tony replied. “More than once, actually.”

“We found all the ticket stubs in a shoebox upstairs. She had ones from even before we moved here,” Mrs. Baker went on. She looked at Clay. “Thank you, for letting her loiter around with you, even though she probably wasn’t supposed to. I know she must have really loved it.”

“Yeah, uh… she’d show up a lot, and… it’d just be… an hour or two of fun,” Clay said. “The last time she came, though, uh, it was probably… end of May? Early June? It was… really nice outside, and she walked to the Crestmont, and told me that she, uh… stopped for some ice cream, or something, before coming over.”

“Right, at that little homemade place near the store. Andy, what is it called?” Mrs. Baker asked. 

“What’s the Scoop?” Mr. Baker replied vaguely, his eyes on his plate. 

“Yes!” Mrs. Baker exclaimed happily, looking at Clay again. 

“Right, she uh… she brought me some, in a little bowl, and swore that it was the best icecream in the world,” Clay said, smiling, “and she was right.”

“So, she liked to just… hang around with you?” Mrs. Baker persisted. 

Clay nodded. “Standing behind the counter, helping me get candy for the people and stuff. And, when there was no on in the lobby, we’d just talk. She’d quote songs, and I’d tell her jokes that no one would get except the two of us. And… we’d just talk, and… go outside, either into the alley, or up onto the roof.”

He smiled to himself, thinking of the countless times he’d been up on the roof himself. “It’s just… sky forever, up there,” he said, almost forgetting he wasn’t just talking to himself. “Sometimes you forget how much time is passing, y’know, because… I was there, me and Hannah, I mean, and… I didn’t think anything would change, because it was just so perfect.”

“And you’d just talk about anything and nothing, huh?” Mr. Baker queried, and Clay nodded. 

“That’s what it felt like. There’s nothing that we couldn’t discuss, like… boys we wished would notice us, but… didn’t?” He cast a furtive glance at Tony, hoping he didn’t catch it. “And she’d always say that there was no where else she’d rather be, and I agreed, because… it was just that amazing.”

“Oh, Clay,” Mrs. Baker managed through her freely falling tears. She stood up and hurried around the table in order to hug him, tightly. “Thank you for telling us that.”

And, for whatever reason, Clay hugged her back. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm still sorry.


	3. Sincerely Me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's Sincerely Me.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Don't own anything whatsoever.

“Clay, honey?” 

Clay quickly buried his phone beneath his pillow and sat up as his mom pushed her way into his bedroom.

“How are you doing?” she asked him, and he shrugged. 

“Fine, I guess. Why?” 

Lainie exhaled, and sat down on the edge of his bed, near his feet. She then looked at him. “I read Hannah Baker’s suicide note.”

“You found it?” Clay asked, his heart beginning to race. 

“Your dad did, and he showed it to me.” Lainie rested her hand on Clay’s knee. “Honey, why didn’t you tell us about her?” 

“S-she didn’t want anyone to know we were friends,” Clay answered. “I… I don’t really know why. I guess it was a combination of a lot of things, maybe.”

Lainie furrowed her brows. “It was clear from that letter that she trusted you a lot.” 

“I know,” Clay replied, glancing downwards. “I… I had no idea that she… she was so sad. I tried to text her, after I found out that someone had gotten ahold of the letter, and… she never… responded.” 

“Oh, Clay,” Lainie said, moving up on the bed in order to pull him into a hug. “It’s all right,” she soothed, holding the back of his head. “You tried your best. It wasn’t your fault that the letter got out, and it isn’t your fault Hannah did what she did.”

“But… but what if it is?” Clay managed, and Lainie allowed him to pull back. “What if it is my fault the letter got around.”

“How could it be your fault?” his mother asked him, and Clay shrugged. 

“I-I don’t know. Maybe if we hadn’t… talked like that. Maybe if we’d talked more in person, I would’ve…” He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

Lainie gazed at him for a moment. “Do you need to talk to Dr. Ellman?” 

“No, Mom, I told you that I… I’m tired of therapy!” Clay said, moving off of his bed and across the room. He stared out his window while his mother remained seated on the bed, watching him. 

“Are you sure?” she finally asked. 

“ _ Yes _ ,” Clay replied. “There’s nothing wrong with me that I can’t handle myself, all right? I need to learn to handle things myself.”

“Clay, handling things yourself might be one of the reasons Hannah decided to kill herself,” Lainie tried, rising from the bed at last. “I don’t want you to -”

“What? Consider taking the easy way out, too?” 

Lainie paused, and she frowned at him. “That is not the way I want you to be thinking about this.” 

“Well, it is, all right?” Clay ran a hand through his hair. “It… it was the easy way out. And Hannah didn’t have to handle things by herself. She had Tony, and… and me, too, I guess.” He dropped his hand. “She could’ve talked to anyone, and they could’ve helped her, but she didn’t.”

Lainie continued to gaze at him for a moment. “What about Tony, then? If you won’t let me take you to Dr. Ellman, at least talk to him. He helps you; I’ve seen it.”

“Tony’s busy dealing with… Hannah stuff,” Clay mumbled without looking at her. “I don’t want to bother him.”

“Well… maybe the two of you can deal with Hannah stuff together,” Lainie suggested. “If you were both close with her, maybe sticking together right now will help the two of you through it.”

Clay finally turned in her direction, and Lainie held out her hands. “I just… don’t want you to feel like you’re alone, when you’re not,” she concluded. 

“All right,” he said, and she raised an eyebrow. “I get it. I’m not alone.” 

“Are you sure?” she asked him, and he nodded. 

“Definitely.”

“All right,” she said, and then she started towards the door. “Your dad and I are right downstairs if you need to talk to us.”

“Got it,” Clay said. “Thank you.”

With a final lingering glance, Lainie left his bedroom, and Clay returned to his bed, sitting down on the edge of it. He pressed the heels of his palms into his eyes until he saw stars. How was he going to make it through this? He couldn’t keep lying to everyone, the Bakers, his own parents, Tony… and yet he’d already told Skye that they needed to write up some fake emails between him and Hannah. 

What was he even supposed to put in the emails? Was he supposed to make it like the two of them had just been pen pals at first, and then it had blossomed into a serious friendship? Was there going to be a big, important email containing his confession to being gay? He didn’t know how much he was supposed to have pretended to share with Hannah, and he didn’t know how much she was likely to have shared with him. 

He heard his phone vibrate from where it was beneath his pillow, and he pulled it out in time to see that Tony was calling him. Clay winced, and started to ignore the call, but hesitated at the last second and continued to let it ring instead. 

After a couple of minutes, it buzzed again, this time with a text message. 

Instead, Clay merely locked his phone, grabbed for his backpack, and headed towards the window. 

~*~

_ Dear Clay Jensen,  _

_ Sorry about the lack of writing, lately. I haven’t had much time to sit down at a computer and just spew nonsense. Been really busy with school work. English is kicking my  _ -

“Hannah was great at English,” Clay interjected, and Skye looked at him. 

“Was she?” 

He nodded. “Jeff Tweeted that she helped him, once.”

“Well, shit,” Skye said, backspacing. “Hannah helps  _ Jeff Atkins _ in English  _ once _ , and suddenly she’s incredible at it.”

“Well, we can’t just assume that she wasn’t,” Clay responded. “Why don’t we use the universal subject that pretty much everyone is bad at?” Skye blinked at him, waiting, and Clay threw up his hands. “Math!”

“Oh, sure.”

_ Math is kicking my ass.  _

_ I hope you’ve been doing okay. I know you said in your last email that you were having trouble with deciding whether or not you wanted to ask Tony out.  _

_ Let me tell you, if you do, I might have to kill you. _

“Uh, that’s a bit extreme, don’t you think?” Clay asked. 

“What? She’s supposed to have been in love with him, too, right?”

“I mean, yeah, I guess, but if we bonded over this type of thing, we can’t act like Hannah was resentful towards me.” Clay scratched the back of his neck. “And… I’d like to leave Tony out of it, if we can.”

Skye snorted to herself, and backspaced again. 

_ I know you said in your last email that you were having trouble with telling your parents that you spent all of your last paycheck just on candy from the Crestmont, but why do you need to tell them, anyway? It’s not like they pay attention to your finances.  _

“My parents pay close attention to my -”

“Oh, holy shit, then you write it!” Skye exclaimed, pushing her laptop in Clay’s direction. 

He sighed to himself, and deleted some of the email before trying again. 

_ It’s not like they can make you take it back. We already ate it all, didn’t we?  _

_ We should do another day on the roof, but instead of watching the clouds, we could watch the stars. It’ll be fun, pretending like we have nothing better to do than look at the stars, right?  _

“Gag me with a spoon.  _ Stargazing _ ?” Skye asked incredulously, reading over his shoulder. 

“Shut up.”

_ Then you can tell me all about the shitty, shitty constellations that I’m sure you know all about from your geeky  _ Star Wars _ movies.  _

_ Sincerely,  _

_ Me _

“There,” Skye said, taking the laptop back from him. “Are we done?” 

“Well, I can’t just give the Bakers  _ one _ email,” Clay told her. “I need to make it seem like… I was a good friend, y’know?” 

“Oh my God,” Skye sighed in exasperation. “Fine. What next, your highness?”

“My response,” Clay answered. 

Skye rolled her eyes, but all the same created a fake email response from Clay’s email account, and turned the laptop towards him so that he could write it. 

_ Dear Hannah Baker,  _

_ I’ve been missing our talks, too. In order to relax, maybe you should take some deep breaths, go on a walk? _

“Uh, no,” Skye said. 

Clay ignored her. 

_ They’re showing a new movie at the Crestmont. Something about alien abductees.  _

“No,” Skye said, again.

_ And yes, you will be amazed by all my  _ Star Wars _ expertise _ . 

“Abso _ lutely _ not.”

_ We should totally talk about all the stars together, maybe make up names for the constellations we don’t already know.  _

_ I’ll email again soon.  _

_ Sincerely,  _

_ Me _

“Well, I guess it is something  _ you’d  _ send,” Skye said with a roll of her eyes. 

“How about one more from Hannah, just for good measure?” Clay suggested. Skye gave him a side eye, and he stammered, “It can be short!”

With a roll of her eyes, Skye created a new email for Hannah’s fake account.

_ Dear Clay Jensen, _

_ Walking isn’t my thing, but I’ll take your advice.  _

_ After all, sometimes all someone needs is a little reinvention, right? Maybe I need to give something else my attention, and just forget about math entirely.  _

_ Even without math, I can be who I want to be, right?  _

_ Sincerely, _

_ Me _

_ P.S. - Tony’s so hot. _

“What the hell?” Clay shouted, and Skye smirked 

“My bad.”

~*~

“So, uh, here’s just a couple back and forth emails we sent at the start of the school year,” Clay said, handing the printed emails over to Mrs. Baker the following day. 

She read through them, and Clay saw her eyes light up. “I can’t believe this,” she said after a moment. “It… she sounds so… different.”

“Yeah, well, I guess maybe she was,” Clay stated, scratching the back of his neck. 

Mrs. Baker pressed the emails to her chest, and looked at him. “I’ll show these to Andy. He’ll be happy to read them, I think.”

Clay nodded. “I’m glad I could get them to you.”

“Are there more?” Mrs. Baker asked, hopefully, and Clay hesitated a moment before nodding. 

“Yeah, a ton more.”

“I’d love to read as many of them as you’d… feel comfortable giving to me,” Mrs. Baker said, “since I don’t have many things like this left of her.”

“Yeah, sure,” Clay answered. “I’ll print some more and bring them to you.” 

He turned to leave, and head home, but Mrs. Baker called him to a stop. 

“Clay.” He glanced over his shoulder at her, and she gestured. “Do you want to stay for dinner?” 

“Uh… no, I don’t think so. My… my parents will want me home,” Clay said. 

“Are you sure? Tony’s coming, again.” She tilted her head. “He said that he hasn’t been eating well, since Hannah…” She trailed off, and then cleared her throat, shuffling the papers. “Well, no one can blame him for that, can they?” 

“No,” Clay agreed, feeling extremely guilty. He’d been eating just fine. “I mean… I guess I can call my mom, and ask if it’s okay.”

Mrs. Baker lit up, and she nodded. “I’ll just call the store and let Andy know we’re going to have two guests tonight, instead of just one. He’ll be glad to see you again, Clay.”

She stood and disappeared into the kitchen, and Clay fumbled his phone out of his pocket. He was, sadly, unsurprised to see that he had two texts, one from each parent. 

  


Great. So he wouldn’t need to lie to him about where he was going to be that night. That was good. 

Still, though, that didn’t stop him from texting Skye. 

_ Real helpful _ , Clay thought sourly, and he shoved his phone back into his pocket just as Mrs. Baker returned from the kitchen, still smiling. 

“We’re having honeyed chicken. I hope that’s okay,” she told him. 

Clay somehow grinned in response. “Sounds delicious.”

There was the fairly distinct sound of an older car pulling up outside the house. “There’s Tony,”  Mrs. Baker said, sounding pleased. “You’ll get the door for him, right? I need to keep an eye on the potatoes.”

“Oh, uh… yeah, sure,” Clay said, balking at the idea of being the one to greet Tony at the Bakers’ front door. 

Still, that didn’t stop him from walking to the door and pulling it open when the doorbell rang. 

Tony, much to Clay’s disappointed, gave him a look similar to one that someone might make as soon as they realized they’d just spent an hour complete an assignment, only to find out the due date had been moved to the next week. 

“What are you doing here?” 

“I brought Mrs. Baker some of the emails Hannah and I exchanged,” Clay replied, “and she invited me to stay for dinner.”

“Emails you and Hannah exchanged, huh?” Tony moved around him into the house, and Mrs. Baker poked her head out of the kitchen. 

“Hi, Tony!” she said in greeting. 

“How are you, Mrs. Baker?” Tony queried, heading into the kitchen. Clay followed, not really seeing any other choice. 

“As good a can be expected,” Mrs. Baker replied, smiling tiredly. “Clay brought some emails over.”

“I heard,” Tony said, glancing sideways at Clay. “Do you mind if I read them?” 

“Not at all,” Mrs. Baker said immediately. “They’re on the table in the dining room.”

Tony left the kitchen, and Clay stood awkwardly in the archway between kitchen and dining room, not sure who he needed to spend more time with. He didn’t  _ want _ to be with Tony, because Tony made him extremely uncomfortable, but he also wanted to see what Tony’s reaction to the emails was. 

So, keeping an eye on Tony, he listened as Mrs. Baker started to ramble about how to properly cook potatoes. Apparently, the key was not leaving them out for too long before cooking them. 

“I’ll have to mention that to my mom,” Clay said when she was done explaining. “Sometimes hers are really dry, or too hard.”

Tony had finished reading the emails, and he was now looking at Clay with furrowed brows. Clay swallowed and tried to avoid his gaze. 

Tony came back into the kitchen, holding the emails. “Which movie was this, that you mentioned?” he asked, and Clay started. He hadn’t been expecting questions. 

“I… I don’t remember. One of those indie films that the Crestmont shows on off-days, you know.” He looked at Mrs. Baker. “Do you need me to set the table or anything?”

“Oh, sure, honey,” Mrs. Baker responded, and she gestured towards a cabinet. “Plates are in there. Tony, you know where the silverware is.”

Clay pulled four plates from the cabinet, and ducked into the dining room just before Tony, who followed a moment later. They slowly circled the table, Clay setting down a plate while Tony laid a fork and knife beside each one. When he was out of things to distract himself from looking at Tony, Clay glanced at him, and found that Tony was already watching him. 

“Why haven’t you been answering my texts? Or my calls?” he asked, and Clay let out a breath. 

“I haven’t been able to.”

“Too busy writing emails?” 

Clay looked at him, eyes wide. “What do you mean?”

“Come on, Clay,” Tony sighed, setting down the last fork he had in his hands. “You and I both know that you and Hannah were about as close as Alex Standall and… I don’t know, Ryan Shaver.”

“Maybe that’s what you thought,” Clay retorted hotly, “but Hannah was a close friend of mine. You just didn’t get to see it, because we didn’t act like it at school.” 

“Because Hannah thought you’d ‘ruin her image’?” Tony asked, putting up air quotes. “Hannah didn’t care about that kind of thing, Clay. If you’d actually been her friend, you might have known that.”

“Tony…” Clay closed his eyes momentarily and steadied his breathing. “I’m sorry that you… you lost your friend, okay?” he began, opening his eyes once more and looking Tony square in the face. “But, believe it or not, I lost a friend, too. And I could really use that support you’re so good at giving.”

Just then, they heard the front door open, and the sound of Mr. Baker saying, “Hello? I’m home.” 

Clay turned back to Tony. “Do you want me to go?” he asked. 

“Maybe you should,” Tony answered, picking up the printed emails. He lifted them. “I think you did enough for the Bakers, today.”

Clay exhaled. “Fine,” he said, and he started out of the dining room. Tony watched him go, bowing his head as he heard Mr. Baker: “Where are you going, Clay?”

“My mom texted; said she wants me home. I’m sorry,” Clay responded. 

“Well, come back some other night, then,” Mr. Baker offered. “We like seeing you.”

“Yes, sir,” Clay replied, and Tony thought he could hear a smile on his voice. “I’ll be back, and with more emails.”

“Sounds good,” Mr. Baker replied. “I’ll walk you out.”

Tony bowed his head over a dining room chair, but lifted it when Mrs. Baker walked into the room, carrying a tray. “Where’s Clay?” she asked, her smile faltering slightly. 

“He had to go home,” Tony answered, reaching for the fourth plate setting in order to put it away. “He said he was sorry.”

He was still holding the printed emails, and, after he’d put away the plate and silverware, he leaned back against the counter, and read through them again. 

They sounded a little like Hannah, he had to admit. Maybe it wasn’t exactly the Hannah he knew, but there was some of her in there. Maybe she had been a different Hannah while talking to Clay. 

Still. He didn’t know what to think when it came to Clay.  _ He’d _ been the one to suggest Clay write letters, letters that began the exact same way as the one Hannah had apparently written, and as the emails he was now holding. Maybe Clay hadn’t wanted to write a letter himself because it was weird to use the same opening that Hannah used in her emails? 

Tony shook his head to himself and rubbed at his eyes with his free hand. He had absolutely no idea what to think. He’d thought he knew Hannah, but… perhaps he hadn’t, not as well as he'd thought he did. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm getting more sorry with every chapter I post.


	4. If I Could Tell Her (Him)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's If I Could Tell Her, but based on a him, instead.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And still, I own nothing.

“Who’re you texting?”

Clay immediately locked and dropped his phone before looking up at his mother, who’d just entered the room. “Just Tony.”

Immediately, she smiled at him. “That’s good, honey. Have you been helping one another?”

Clay nodded. “Yeah, he’s been… really nice to me, and I’ve been trying to return the favor.” He smiled slightly. “I think it’s working out for both of us.”

Lainie looked happy. “I’m proud of you,” she said, and then she crossed her arms. “Well, I have to head down to work for a while, but I left some money on the table for you, so -”

“I thought we were doing that family dinner tonight?” Clay asked, his grin disappearing almost instantly. “You and Dad said that… on Thursday…”

“Oh.” Lainie’s face had fallen. “It is Thursday, isn’t it? Oh, God, Clay, I’m so sorry, sweetheart. I completely forgot.” She pressed the heel of her palm to her forehead as she thought about it. “Well, your dad is home, so I’m sure he’d like it if the two of you could sit down to a meal together. It’s been a while, hasn’t it, since the two of you talked one-on-one?”

“I mean, I guess,” Clay replied, fiddling with his cell phone. “I don’t know.”

“Well, I left money downstairs, in case the two of you decide you want pizza or something.” Lainie seemed distraught. “I’m sorry, Clay. I didn’t even think -”

“Mom,” Clay interrupted. “It’s fine. It’s not like it’s the first time you’ve done this, right?”

That didn’t seem to do much for Lainie’s spirits, because her eyebrows drew together. “We can do the family dinner tomorrow night?” she suggested, and Clay shook his head.

“I can’t. I’m… busy.”

“We’ll figure it out, then,” Lainie said, and Clay shrugged one shoulder, not looking at her. “Clay.”

“I think I’ll just go over to Tony’s,” he said, picking up his phone and moving past her out of his bedroom.

He passed by the sitting room on the way out of the house, and his father glanced over at him. “Hey, pal. What’re we doing for dinner, tonight?”

“Nothing,” Clay answered, yanking open the front door. “I’m going to Tony’s.”

“O-okay. Text -” Clay walked out of the house, closing the front door a lot louder than he needed to.

He retrieved his bike and hopped onto it, heading for the Bakers’ house, where no doubt a homecooked meal awaited him.

As he suspected, Mrs. Baker was more than happy to invite him to eat with them. “It’ll be ready in about ten minutes,” she said, and Clay nodded gratefully as she went back into the kitchen.

He glanced around momentarily before heading down a hall. At the end, he found a partially closed door, which he nudged open wider with his knuckles. On the other side was no doubt what had been Hannah’s room.

Clay stepped into it, glancing around. The bedspread was purple, and she didn’t have many decorations. Her desk was scattered with papers of all kinds. A few stuffed animals resided on the bed.

He moved over to sit down on it, exhaling slightly.

“Why are you in Hannah’s room?”

He jumped, and looked to see that Tony was standing in the doorway, arms crossed and leaning against the wall.

“I was just… waiting for dinner,” he explained, getting up off of the bed.

Tony tilted his head. “Don’t your parents wonder where you are? Ever?” he asked.

“Yeah, sure, but… they aren’t home, tonight,” Clay said feebly, avoiding his gaze. “And it’s not like I’m never home, and that I don’t tell them where I am when I’m not.”

“But you’re here tonight,” Tony said, “and you were here last night, too.”

“You weren’t,” Clay pointed out, and Tony shook his head.

“I drove past, and I saw your bike.”

Clay fiddled with a loose string on his jacket. “I just… you know my mom and how she works a lot. I’m tired of eating pizza and leftovers for dinner.”

“And your dad? Doesn’t he get lonely?” Tony questioned, stepping further into the room.

“I mean… I don’t think so,” Clay replied. “He would do just fine living on his own in the woods, as long as he had an endless supply of pizza rolls and books to read on his iPad.”

He was relieved to see Tony smile, and he decided to milk it a little bit more. “And the Bakers are great.”

Here, Tony’s smile faltered, and he exhaled. “I don’t know how well they’re doing,” he said, quietly. “They might be trying to hide it, but… I know that they aren’t happy, right now, and not just because of Hannah.”

“I mean… I think every couple fights,” Clay said, frowning.

“I think Mrs. Baker is still in denial, and Mr. Baker doesn’t know how to handle that,” Tony went on, as though Clay hadn’t spoken. He settled down on the edge of Hannah’s bed, and ran his hand over the bedspread. “I wish I knew how to help them.”

Clay, feeling terribly uncomfortable, moved backwards away from the bed, slightly. “Don’t you think you being here is helping them?”

Tony snorted. “Me? Hannah’s 'unrequited crush'?”

“They can’t blame you for that,” Clay told him. “It’s not your fault.”

“I know,” Tony sighed, “but sometimes, I feel like it is, when Mrs. Baker looks at me the wrong way, and then has to pretend like she wasn’t looking at me at all.”

“S-so…” Clay started, deciding to change the subject. “How’s the ‘stang?”

Tony glanced up at him, a ghost of a smile playing on the edges of his mouth. “Did you really just ask me a question about my car?”

“I mean… sure?” Clay asked. “Unless you don’t want to talk about your car, then you don’t have to answer it, obviously. Sorry, I just thought the topic needed to change, because it was getting a bit uncomfortable.” He winced, and scratched the back of his neck. “And I’m rambling a little, aren’t I? Sorry.”

“Sort of,” Tony replied, “but it’s better than the long periods of silence I was getting before.”

“Sorry about that,” Clay said.

“Why’re you saying ‘sorry’ so much?” Tony questioned, and Clay shrugged.

“I like to say it? Sorry.”

“You don’t have to keep saying it,” Tony told him.

Clay nodded, but he tilted his head to one side and closed one eye. Tony grinned at him. “You really want to say it again, don’t you?”

“Yeah, a lot,” Clay replied, nodding again.

Tony shook his head with a small chuckle. “You’re a funny guy, Clay.”

Clay winced. “I don’t know if that’s the word I’d use. Weird, maybe. Not funny.”

“I think you’re funny,” Tony said, “sometimes.”

Clay forced a smile, and looked down at his feet. There was silence for a moment.

“Did she really… feel that way about me?” Clay glanced up, and saw Tony was watching him. “Did she mean what she said? … _he's the most real person in my life, and he’s the only one who actually talks and listens to me, but it's so hard to talk to him, because he's Tony and I love him._ ” Tony swallowed, visibly. “I always thought our conversations went fine, but…”

“Well… I don’t know, really,” Clay started, and Tony turned his gaze downwards. “I mean… I don’t know for sure, but maybe… maybe she just _thought_ she was having a hard time talking to you because she felt that way. Maybe she knew that you were gay, and she felt uncomfortable because… because she knew, and she still felt that way about you.”

Tony inhaled. “So, you and Hannah… you talked about me?” he asked, and Clay nodded rapidly, up and down.

“Yeah, all the time,” he said. “She couldn’t really talk about you with anyone else, and so she came to talk to me. We only talked if she brought you up, of course, because… well, why would I bring you up, right? She had no idea that the two of us were friends, and I didn’t tell her, because… because of how she felt about you.”

Tony was frowning slightly, and Clay decided he needed to wrap this up, quick. “She… she really cared about you, Tony.”

“Yeah?” Clay nodded again, and Tony exhaled. “Then it was my fault, wasn’t it? Because I didn’t care about her the same way she did about me.”

“N-no! That’s not… that’s not what I’m saying,” Clay said, quickly, and Tony drew his eyebrows together.

“What are you saying, then, Clay?”

“I… I’m saying that Hannah trusted me, a lot, but… you were the one she could go to whenever she needed to,” Clay replied, thinking of how whenever he needed help, Tony was, and always had been, the one constant he could count on. “She loved you because of that, I think.” He grinned slightly. “She’d talk about things she noticed about you, that I never noticed, and things you… never told me.”

“Like what?” Tony asked.

“Well, uhm…” Clay thought about it for a moment, and then his grin grew. “Okay! Well, she said, once that, uh, sometimes, when you go to turn on your car, you get this small smirk on your face, like you know that your car’s the coolest one at the school, and like… you’re proud of that, y’know?” He shrugged. “She said… that smile is so subtle, but perfect, and… and real.”

“Oh,” Tony said. “The asshole smirk.”

“No, no! She said it’s a good smile, a nice smile, one that makes everyone else feel good, too, because you feel good,” Clay said, quickly. “And… and she told me that the… the stars tattooed behind your ear? She said she thought you have them because you like stargazing, and that you read _Cosmopolitan_ , sometimes, because you like to read your horoscope.”

Tony was watching him. “Why didn’t she say she noticed any of that?” he asked.

“I guess… I don’t know. Because she thought it was weird, that she’d seen things like that? But… she’d always tell me that she wished she could tell you, but knew she shouldn’t. She… she thought you were a million worlds apart, despite the fact that you were close,” Clay responded.

“What else did she say?” Tony asked, sounding curious.

“So much!” Clay said, eagerly. “Uh… she said so many things, it's hard to… think of the best ones.” He considered it for a moment, and then said. “Okay. Uhm… she thought… you look really nice - uh - it looks really nice when you let your hair do its thing.”

“Really?” Tony reached up to touch his hair, which was currently confined to its typical slicked back hump.

“Uh-huh,” Clay replied. “And… she wondered how you managed to act so cool all the time, even though everyone thinks you're hiding something.”

“They do?” Tony asked in shock, and Clay pressed on.

“But she didn’t tell you any of this, because she knew that… uhm, it’d just be too weird, because… y’know, she didn’t like to hurt anyone’s feelings, and she thought she might hurt yours, by pointing out that you don’t need to do that to your hair, or that everyone can see past the… leather-jacket Tony.”

Tony didn’t look too convinced, and Clay started towards the bed. “I mean… she just thought that… there was too much unspoken distance between the two of you,” he said. “And so… she didn’t… know… how to say it.”

“How to say _what_ , Clay?” Tony asked, tiredly.

Clay swallowed, and sat down on the edge of the bed. “I love you,” he said, and Tony frowned at him. Clay quickly went on with, “She… she didn’t know how to say… I love you.”

Then, before he could think about what he was doing, he leaned forward and kissed Tony, hard.

Tony immediately leaned back, and slid off the bed, eyes wide. “What are you doing?” he asked in shock, and Clay jumped to his feet.

“I -”

“Boys! Dinner’s ready!” Mrs. Baker called from the kitchen.

“Tell them I left,” Tony said, shaking his head and hurrying out of Hannah’s bedroom.

Clay gaped at the ground, feeling absurdly empty. _What the hell did I just do_?


	5. Disappear

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's Disappear.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I should probably mention that none of this is an original idea. It's more like I'm rewriting a musical to fit a Fiction based in a completely different fandom.  
> I guess I'll go back at write that at the start of all of the chapters.

“You did  _ what _ ?” Skye shouted later on that evening, watching as Clay stalked across her bedroom, head hanging. “I can’t believe you tried to kiss Tony, in Hannah’s bedroom, after pretending all the creepy things you think about him were actually nice things  _ she’d _ said about him!” 

Clay finally turned and looked at her, and narrowed his eyes when he saw the button that Skye had on her shirt. “Is… is that a  _ button _ with Hannah’s face on it?” he demanded. 

“I’m going to sell them at school tomorrow,” Skye explained. 

“Wait, you’re making  _ money _ off of this?” Clay asked in disgusted shock. 

“I’m not the only one,” Skye defended herself. “Haven’t you seen the wristbands? And the stickers? Everyone is profiting from her suicide, including you.” 

“What am I going to do about Tony?” Clay asked tiredly, sinking down onto the floor. 

“Are you kidding? After earlier on, you can never show your face around him again, and you might as well stay away from the Bakers while you’re at it, because he’s going to know, now, that that letter they think was Hannah’s was actually yours. And you can bet he’s going to tell them that.”

“But -”

“Clay, listen to me,” Skye said. “This whole Hannah thing is going to be over in a few more days. No one is going to be talking about it anymore, so maybe you should move on before everyone else does, so that you don’t get left behind.” 

“But what about the wristbands and the stickers…?”

“Don’t you get it, kid?” Skye asked him. “We’re at the peak of the aftermath. I need to push these buttons before everyone forgets all this happened, because, soon enough, there’s going to be a different horror that attracts everyone’s attention.” She shrugged. “It’s how the world works, and, eventually, Hannah will just be that dead girl whose name no one remembers.”

“How can you say that?” Clay questioned in shock. “She was a person, and… and she was here…”

“Sure, but she wasn’t anything special, was she? Just another face in the hallways for most people.” Skye reached over and touched his shoulder. “But hey, it was fun while it lasted, wasn’t it?”

Clay swallowed, and hauled himself to his feet. “I just wanted to help them,” he said. 

“Ride home carefully, okay? I don’t want the next horror to be you, found dead on the side of the road because you got hit by a car or something,” Skye told him. 

“I’ll be okay,” Clay replied, and then he lowered himself out through her window and trotted to where he’d stashed his bike. 

He pedaled home without thinking of much, and, before going up to his room, informed his dad was home. 

“Where’d you go?” 

“No where,” Clay answered, and he jogged up the stairs to his room, and shut the door. 

~*~

~*~

“What am I supposed to do?” Clay asked. 

“Why  _ don’t _ you talk to Tony?” 

Clay glanced at Hannah, who was leaning against his desk, watching him, and he shook his head. “I can’t. I already ruined everything when it comes to Tony.”

“Says who? Skye?” Hannah rolled her eyes. “Why are you even talking to Skye about this?”

“Who else am I supposed to talk to?” Clay demanded, and Hannah walked over to where he sat on his bed. 

“You can talk to me.” Clay scoffed. “Unless you have… other choices.”

Clay gazed at her for a moment, and then he looked down at his phone, which he was still holding in one hand. “I don’t know what to do,” he said, quietly. 

Hannah let out a breath. “Clay, my parents need you.  _ Tony _ needs you, even though he might not act like it.” She sat down on the bed next to him. “You’re the only person that can make sure no one just… forgets about me.” She was quiet for a moment. “Oh, wait, they already did.”

“It took a month.”

“And once they forget about me entirely, what happens to you, my  _ best friend _ ?” Hannah asked him. “Nobody cared about you before that letter, and before I killed myself, just like no one cared about me. Nobody  _ cares _ about people like us, Clay.”

“What do you mean by that?” Clay questioned, frowning at her. 

Hannah raised an eyebrow. “Hannah Baker? The girl who ended up on Alex Standall’s Best/Worst list just because his girlfriend wouldn’t fuck him? Clay Jensen, the boy who tries to hide from everyone because he doesn't think anybody wants to see him .” 

Clay didn’t know what to say, so he stayed quiet, looking away again. “Look, people like you and me, we’re just… waiting to be seen, even if you don't think you want to be," Hannah told him. "No one ever stops to notice us, so we just get lost in the hallways until someone decides to use us to their advantage.”

“Right,” Clay said softly. “Like Montgomery with the letter.”

“Exactly,” Hannah said, “but… if you can somehow keep them from forgetting about me, then you’ll be able to stay noticed, and I won’t just… disappear.” Clay glanced at her, and Hannah smiled slightly. “No one deserves to be forgotten, or believe that no one ever even realized they were there. No one deserves to fade away.”

Clay offered a shrug. “It’s true,” he admitted. “Even if we always stick to the background, we still matter.”

“And even if you never manage to do anything remarkable, that doesn’t mean that you can’t be remembered.” Hannah leaned towards him. “People need to know, Clay. You need to show them.”

“I need to show them that… that no one deserves to disappear,” Clay concluded, and Hannah smiled, nodding. 

“Exactly.”

The rest of the day was spent creating an outline of a plan, and then designing a pamphlet that he could show to the people that he needed to get on board, if his plan was even going to work. 

The next day, at school, Clay rounded up Jeff and Skye at lunch, and dragged them into the hall to show them his pamphlet. 

“I’m calling it the Hannah Project,” he explained to them. 

“The Hannah Project?” Skye asked skeptically as she flipped through the pamphlet. 

“Yeah,” Clay said, nodding. “A student-ran group dedicated to keeping Hannah’s memory alive, and to showing that… everyone matters. Everybody’s important.”

Jeff was grinning at him. “This’s awesome, man. I’m proud of you.”

“I’d like you to be my co-president, since… it was sort of your idea,” Clay told him, and Jeff’s grin grew wider. 

“I’d be honored, dude.”

“And, Skye? We could use a treasurer,” Clay added, looking at her. 

She glanced up from the pamphlet, and between the two boys, before she grinned as well and nodded. “All right,” she said. “Count me in.”

“Wait… we’re really doing this, then?” Clay asked, and Jeff let out a laugh. 

“Are you kidding? We have to do this. Not just for Hannah, but… for everyone,” he said. “None of the kids who’ve killed themselves should be forgotten, and anyone who’s thinking about suicide should know that there’s people out there who care about them.” He slung his arm around Clay’s neck. “Let’s talk to the Bakers about this, and to Tony, too. I think I have an idea about a kickstarter event, already.”

“What do you mean?” Clay questioned, allowing Jeff to pull him down the hall. 

“A school assembly, to talk about Hannah,” Jeff added, “and to let everyone know about our fundraiser, that’ll dedicate money to suicide hotlines and stuff like that.”

“Oh, yeah,” Clay said, glancing at Skye, who was walking along beside them. She lifted an eyebrow, and Clay exhaled, before looking back at Jeff. “That… that sounds great.” 

~*~

Later on that evening, the three of them were at the Bakers’ household. Clay was looking at them both, while also avoiding Tony’s gaze. Jeff had invited him over for this, and, thankfully, Clay had already thought of a way to include him. 

“We’re calling it the Hannah Project,” he said to her parents. 

“The Hannah Project?” Mrs. Baker asked, taking the pamphlet from Jeff. 

“Think of it as a… an online presence -” 

“One with resources and links -”

“And a massive fundraising drive -”

“To help people like Hannah,” Clay concluded, stepping in front of Skye in order to lay out a few other things on the table.

“And, for the kickstarter event, we were thinking of holding a school assembly, where anyone who wants to say a few words about Hannah can,” Jeff added. “Like a memorial.”

“I… I don’t know what to say,” Mrs. Baker said, looking at the assortment of papers and things that Clay had laid out on the table in front of her.

“We had no idea that Hannah meant this much to everyone,” Mr. Baker added, taking the pamphlet from her. 

“Oh, yeah,” Jeff said. “I loved Hannah. She never minded helping me out in English, when I asked her too. We had a project, once, where we had to read a poem, and she read something by Robert Frost, I think.” He shook his head. “She must’ve really liked that poem, because her reading seemed so… real.”

“For the assembly, I was thinking, maybe, if you wanted, Tony, you could… I don’t know, play a bunch of Hannah’s favorite songs, or something,” Clay inserted before he lost his nerve.

Tony, who’d been sitting quietly at one end of the table, glanced up at this. “Oh, yeah, sure,” he said absently. “Whatever you need.”

“Great idea, Clay!” Skye said, loudly. 

“Thank you, Skye!” Clay retorted with a warning look over his shoulder at her. 

Mrs. Baker was beginning to get teary eyed. “Oh, Clay,” she said, rising from her chair and moving around the table to hug him. “This is wonderful. Thank you.” 

Clay merely smiled weakly in response. “Well… no one deserves to be forgotten.”

Mrs. Baker nodded in agreement. “No one.”

~*~

“Ah, Olivia wanted me to give you this,” Mr. Baker said after dinner a few nights later, and he held out a tie toward Clay. 

“A tie?” Clay asked, frowning down at it. 

“Yeah, she said that she thought you might like one, for the assembly tomorrow.” When Clay merely continued to stare at him, blankly, Mr. Baker cleared his throat. “For your speech.”

“My speech,” Clay repeated vaguely. 

“Jeff said that… anyone who wanted to talk about Hannah would be able to,” Mr. Baker said, the hand holding the tie lowering, slightly. “We assumed that you’d be the first one on the list.”

“Oh, uh, yeah, no, I definitely would be, under any… other circumstances,” Clay said, quickly, “but… public speaking isn’t really one of my better qualities. You don’t want me talking at the assembly, because I’d probably just ruin it.”

“What do you mean?” Mr. Baker asked. “You were Hannah’s best friend, Clay. If you don’t speak at the assembly, then we might as well not have one.” He tried to hand him the tie again. “Come on, Olivia and I want to hear from you, and… I’m sure Tony does, too.” 

There was a moment, then, where Clay was certain that Mr. Baker knew all about Clay’s feelings for Hannah’s “unrequited crush”, and he didn’t know whether he should be relieved, or horrified.

“I could really just borrow one of my dad’s…” Clay started, and Mr. Baker shook his head. 

“If Olivia doesn’t see you leaving the house with a tie in your hand, I’ll never hear the end of it,” he said, winking. “Take it.”

Clay let out a breath, and reached for the tie. It was nice, black-and-purple striped. He had a black button down that he could wear it with. “Thank you.”

“Even if you don’t say anything, you should still look nice,” Mr. Baker added, patting him on the back before leading the way out of the dining room and towards the front door. He pulled it open. “You are co-president of the Hannah Project, after all.”

“Right,” Clay answered, weakly, and then he exited the house, sliding the tie into his pocket. 

Once he’d gotten home, he took the tie out again and looked down at it, and then at his desk, where a stack of unused note cards sat, waiting for him. 

With grim determination, he went to his desk, sat down at it, and began to write out a speech. 


	6. You Will Be Found

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's You Will Be Found

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh, look at that. Still don't own anything.

The next afternoon, near the end of the school day, the entirety of Liberty High School students and faculty moved into the gym for Hannah Baker’s memorial assembly. Clay waited on the side of the gym, watching Tony from across it. He’d brought a complete setup, including a mix tape of Hannah specific songs, which was currently playing, and reaching it’s last notes. 

“Are you ready?” Jeff asked as the final song on Tony’s tape of Hannah’s favorites neared its end. 

Clay swallowed, and nodded. “I think so.”

“You’ve got this, buddy,” Jeff assured, giving him a pat on the back. “Just imagine everybody in their underpants.”

“What?” Clay looked at him in shock, and Jeff frowned at him. 

“You’ve never heard that before?”

“Sure I have, but… it doesn’t actually work, does it?” 

“Guess you’ll find out,” Jeff answered, and then the crowd started applauding. “You’re on, co-president. Make Hannah proud.”

With that, Jeff gave Clay a very unsubtle shove towards the podium that was positioned in the center of the gym. He cleared his throat as he stopped behind it, and reached up to adjust Mr. Baker’s tie, before pulling out his notecards and setting them down on the podium. 

He then looked up, and suddenly felt very, very sweaty. It felt like there were a million people watching him, and there might as well have been, because for him, there was no difference between a classroom full of thirty kids and a gym full of people in an entire school, plus guests. 

It was  _ terrifying _ . 

But, he couldn’t chicken out now. He had to do this. He had his note cards, he had his tie, and he had his determination. He could do it. 

“Good morning,” he began, and his voice was amplified around the entire gym, causing his heart rate to accelerate, “uhm… students, faculty, and… honored guests. I just wanted to say a few things about Hannah Baker. My best friend.”

He glanced up as he moved on to the second note card, and spotted Tony moving up into the bleachers to sit beside Mr. and Mrs. Baker. All three of them looked at him, varying emotions on their faces, and, for a moment, he considering leaning into the microphone before him and admitting to everything. 

Instead, he looked back down at his notecards, and kept going. “I’d like to tell you about all the times she’d come and visit me at work, at the Crestmont theatre. She loved movies, and she loved to… to sit on the roof with me and look at the clouds, and sometimes the stars, wh-when I had… had a late… shift.” 

He swallowed painfully against the lump in his throat, and tried to switch to his next card. “Sh-she always seemed to come visit me on days when… when I wasn’t feeling very good about myself, and…” He accidentally fumbled his note cards, and knocked all of them off the podium. Mortified, he bent down to retrieve them, apologizing to no one in particular. 

As he crouched on the ground, however, looking at his scattered speech, he realized something. This wasn’t real, right? He wasn’t actually speaking the truth about anything, so why did he need notecards to make things up? They were just making it all harder. 

So, leaving his note cards on the ground, he pulled himself back up to his feet with the help of the podium, and looked out at all the people, who were watching him. Some were murmuring to themselves, as though they were guessing that this might be too much for him, that the wounds of Hannah’s suicide were still too fresh. 

“Have you ever felt like… no one was there? Like you were all alone, and… and that you could call out, but nobody would hear?” he asked, which immediately sent a hush over the gym. “Hannah made sure that I didn’t feel like that. She… she had a way of making me feel like she was always there, like I could always go to her, if I needed to, and… and she’s not the only one.”

His eyes landed on Tony, who glanced downwards. Clay quickly moved on. 

“What I mean is that… if I can have multiple people who make me feel less lonely, everyone else should, too. Maybe there’s someone you know already, who makes you feel the way Hannah made me feel. Maybe… maybe all you have to do is wait, because someone is going to come running, and… and they’ll help you.

“When… when you need a friend, because everything’s just… getting really dark, then, all you have to do is look around you, because you will be found by someone, someone who cares, just like Hannah cared about me, and I cared about her.” 

He let out a shaky breath. “Thank you.”

And, much to his surprise, everyone rose to their feet and gave him the loudest applause he’d ever heard in his life. People were whistling, and cheering, and some juniors he knew were chanting his name from somewhere behind him. 

And Clay had never felt better. 

He was engulfed in a tight hug before he knew what was happening, and he recognized first Mrs. Baker’s sobbing form, and then Mr. Baker’s tearful one, shaking his hand. Jeff converged on all of them, and ushered them out of the way so that the next student could speak.

Clay felt rather light headed and cheerful on the way home, and he woke early the next morning, Saturday, to find that he already had messages from Jeff and Skye, both. 

While Clay was laying in bed, thinking about this, his phone rang, and he answered it, only to have Mrs. Baker exclaim in his ear, “Clay! Have you seen the Hannah Project page? People are commenting and posting on it… everyone is reaching out to one another!”

“Yeah, I know,” Clay said. “I’m… I’m not really sure what happened.”

Mrs. Baker laughed. “You did!”

Clay smiled to himself. “Yeah, maybe. Sorry, but… where’d you get my number?” 

“Oh, Tony gave it to me. He said he wants to talk to you, too. I suggested I invite you over for dinner, to celebrate,” Mrs. Baker explained. “You’ll come?” 

“Yeah, of course,” Clay replied, sitting up. 

“We’ll see you at seven, then,” Mrs. Baker said. “Thank you so much, Clay. I know Hannah would be so happy.”

“Yeah, I’ll bet,” Clay replied, and then he hung up the call, before letting his forehead rest against his knees. 

He was happy people were acting the way they were, reaching out to others, mentioning how they had needed to hear what he said in his speech, or how they knew someone else who needed to hear it, but he wasn’t entirely sure if he was happy with himself. 

Sure, he knew that what he’d done was going to help a lot of people in the long run, but he couldn’t help but feel as though the Bakers would get hurt from this, eventually. What if the original letter made it’s way onto the page? Wouldn’t people want to know why her parents hadn’t seen she was struggling? Wouldn’t they want to know why they didn’t try to help her?

And what about Tony? If people learned that he was her unrequited crush, then he might get serious backlash from it, especially with all that stuff about how Tony was so great and everything. If he was so great, why didn’t he help Hannah? 

Clay’s letter just might lead to the downfall of everything, if people other than those who’d already seen it managed to get ahold of it and read it. 

“Shit,” he muttered into his knees. 

~*~

Tony scrolled through the Hannah Project page, reading all of the posts people had put on there so far. They all basically read the same thing, and most of them thanked Clay for his speech, and for saying what someone had needed to say for a long time. 

He had known that he helped Clay, but to hear Clay say it yesterday, however indirectly, had meant a lot to him, especially since he’d been feeling as though he’d failed Hannah since her suicide. Knowing that Clay knew he was helping him… it made him feel better. 

He just hoped that all the people who were posting and commenting on the page meant what they were saying, that they were all there for one another, that no one was alone. He hoped that anyone who had felt like there was no other way through whatever they were going through found the page, and read the posts, and watched Clay’s speech. 

Because, even though Tony hadn't realized it, he'd needed to hear what Clay had to say, just as much as all the people on the page. 

~*~

“Andy?” Mrs. Baker pushed open Hannah’s bedroom door, and found her husband seated on the edge of the bed, clutching one of Hannah’s stuffed animals and his cell phone. She could see, even from where she stood, that he was on the Project page. 

“Her story is helping people,” he said, glancing over at her, and Mrs. Baker nodded, attempting a smile. 

“It is. And Clay made sure of that.” 

“I'm so sorry, Olivia,” Mr. Baker started, his voice breaking. “I should've listened to you, when you said she wasn't acting like herself. I’m so sorry.”

Mrs. Baker immediately went to his side and pulled him to her in a hug. She couldn't say anything, so she hoped that all that was unspoken could be understood through this death grip she now had on her husband. 

When he hugged her back, she knew that he’d gotten it all. 

~*~

Mrs. Baker hadn’t only recruited him for the dinner. Jeff and Skye were there, too, and Clay was shocked to see Skye wearing a pair of leggings that weren't torn. Still black, of course, but not torn. 

Jeff was laughing at every joke Mr. Baker made, and commenting on how he wished he had a way with words like Clay did. 

Mrs. Baker was busy in the kitchen, but that didn't stop her from throwing in a few statements or bits of laughter herself. 

Clay, however, had someone he needed to talk to, badly. 

He found Tony in Hannah’s room, sitting on the edge of her bed and looking at his phone. He glanced up when Clay entered the room, and smiled at him. “Up to seven thousand followers, now,” he said, holding up his phone. 

“It's crazy,” Clay said.

“Not really,” Tony replied, sliding his phone away. He patted the bed, and Clay sat down on it, several inches away from him, leaving a secure gap between them. 

Tony gazed at him for a few moments without speaking. 

“Tony -”

“I thought you were making it all up,” Tony blurted, and Clay blinked at him. “I thought… I thought that letter was yours, and that Hannah had just somehow gotten a hold of it. But… after hearing your speech yesterday…” He shook his head. “No one can make something like that up, Clay. I don't think you have any idea what you’ve done for everyone. The Bakers are actually touching one another again. I… I don't feel like I failed Hannah anymore, because I know I was at least helping someone, and that's what's important, right?”

“Tony,” Clay started, again, but Tony didn't let him keep going.

“You spoke up, and it’s doing amazing things. Everything you said in your speech… it's all so important. You brought Hannah into the light.”

Then, much to Clay’s surprise, Tony broke the barrier between them and kissed him. Clay scooted back, until he was almost hanging off the bed, and Tony leaned away again, looking confused, and sort of hurt. 

“Clay?” 

_ Dear Clay Jensen,  _

_ Today is gonna be a good day, and here’s why: because the things you made up, your lies, they're making everyone feel better. They're helping everyone to heal. They're making everyone happy. _

_ So… don't you deserve some happiness, too? _

He licked his lips, and looked at Tony, who was still watching him. Then, without hesitating, he leaned forward and captured Tony’s mouth with his, moving a hand up to cradle the side of his face. Tony grinned through the kiss, and took hold of the back of Clay’s neck in order to draw Clay in closer. 

_ Dear Clay Jensen _ , 

_ Today is a great day, and here’s why: because you finally have Tony, and that's what matters. _


	7. Only Us

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's Only Us because To Break in a Glove would not work between Clay and Mr. Baker.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't own anything.

Clay sighed to himself as he finished watching Jeff’s newest video. He was a lot better about updating the Project’s followers than he was. He didn’t even mean to leave so much space between one of his posts and the next, but it was just hard for him to come up with stuff to say when Jeff was a lot better at saying all they needed to for him. 

Like, with his most recent video, Jeff had said everything their followers needed to know about the money they were trying to raise in order to help clean up the other movie theatres in town. 

So, really, there wasn’t much left for Clay to say, except maybe to further emphasize the importance of fixing up the theatres. 

He was finishing up his video, which was about three minutes shorter than Jeff’s had been, and getting ready to post it to the page, when his phone buzzed. 

Glancing down at it, he saw he had a new email. 

_ Dear Clay Jensen,  _

_ Thanks for the advice you gave me about Tony. I don’t know how much easier it’s going to be to talk to him, but, thankfully, you’re not the only one I’ve been asking about him.  _

_ Turns out, Skye Miller knows a lot about it works, trying to talk to someone who you’re afraid to have a normal conversation with. How do you feel about maybe including her in these emails of ours? _

_ Sincerely,  _

_ Me _

Clay gaped at the email for a moment, and then he shook his head and brought up a text to Skye. 

“Clay?” His mother opened his door, and Clay put his phone under his leg. “What’re you up to?” 

“Not much,” Clay answered, glancing downwards. 

“I saw Jeff posted a new video on the Hannah Project page,” Lainie commented, sitting down in his desk chair. “$50,000 dollars is a lot of money. You think you can raise it all in three weeks?”

Clay nodded. “We’re hopeful.”

Lainie tilted her head. “How’s Tony?” 

“Okay.”

“Clay, you’ve been working really hard on the Project, and I’m proud of you,” Lainie told him, “but… I feel like you’re not telling me anything.”

“Why should I?” Clay asked, looking up at her. “Everything you need to know is on the page. That’s all that I’ve been doing for a month, now.”

“I know,” Lainie said, “but I’d like to hear it from you, occasionally.” 

“When, Mom?” Clay questioned dryly. “You’re never here, and neither is Dad. And when you are here, you’re both too busy recuperating or whatever the hell it is you do instead of paying attention to your son.”

“Language, young man,” Lainie warned, and Clay inhaled, turning his eyes downwards again. “I didn’t know you felt like we were ignoring you, because whenever I try to talk to you, you push me away.”

“Yeah, well, maybe it’s because I don’t want to get my hopes up? Maybe it’s because… because I don’t think telling you stuff will make everything better.” Clay retrieved his cell phone as it buzzed beneath his leg, and he saw he had a text from Tony, asking if he was still coming to the Bakers’. “I have to go,” he said to his mother, putting his phone in his pocket and rising from his bed. 

“Go where?” Lainie asked him. 

“Jeff’s,” Clay answered. “We’re going to talk about ways we can try to persuade people to donate money to the fundraiser. It’ll take all night, so I’ll probably just stay over.”

Lainie frowned at him as he started to shove an extra pair of clothes into a backpack. “I don’t think I want you going anywhere, tonight,” she said at last, moving to stand in front of the bedroom door. 

“I already told Jeff I was going to come,” Clay replied without looking at her. “We need to talk about this stuff sooner than later, since we only have three weeks to raise the money.”

“Clay, I took tonight off work so that I could talk to you,” Lainie told him. 

“Well, that doesn’t mean I have to change my plans, does it?” Clay demanded. “It’s not my fault that you decide to do things when it suits you, and then you forget to tell me about it.” He zipped the backpack shut and swung it over his shoulder. 

“Clay, tell me what’s going on,” Lainie persisted. 

“Nothing!” Clay all but shouted. “You already know everything that’s happening in my life, because, right now, my life is the Hannah Project, okay? If you want to know more, you can look on the page.” He moved around her and out of the the bedroom. “I have to go.”

“Clay!” He stopped, and glanced over her shoulder at her. Lainie exhaled. “I’m glad you had a friend in Hannah, and I’m so sorry she’s gone, but… I don’t want you to take out everything you’re feeling on this project. You need to talk to someone, and… I want that someone to be me, because I’m your mother.”

“I’m going,” Clay said, and he kept walking. 

Lainie watched him go, and then she glanced over her shoulder into his bedroom, wishing she knew her son just as well as all the followers of the Hannah Project seemed to. 

~*~

“See, I found all these old… things that I had completely forgotten about,” Mr. Baker said, flicking on the light and leading the way into the garage. Clay followed behind him, and blinked at the assortment of memorabilia that was laying out in the open. “If I’d known, I probably would have sold it a long time ago,” Mr. Baker concluded, gesturing towards it. “My grandfather gave my dad all his old baseball stuff, and… baseball wasn’t really my dad’s thing, so he gave it to me, except it’s not really my thing, either, so it was just sitting in here, collecting dust.”

He bent down and picked up and stack of baseball cards, flipping through them. “I guess some of these things might be worth… something, to someone,” he said, “so we can sell them, and use the funds to help with the restorations.”

“That’s a great idea,” Clay told him. “Thank you.”

Mr. Baker shrugged. “It’s nothing, really. What am I going to do with all this old stuff?” He handed the cards to Clay, who didn’t know anything about baseball whatsoever, but looked through them all the same. “What about your dad?”

He glanced up at Mr. Baker. “Huh?” 

“Does your dad like baseball?” Mr. Baker asked, crouching down next to the memorabilia.

“Uh, no,” Clay answered. “He’s more of a stay inside and read an 800 page book kind of guy.”

Mr. Baker chuckled. “I can’t remember the last time I had free time to read a book,” he said, blowing the dust off of a shadow box. “Huh, signed baseball,” he said, peering at it. “I have no clue who these people are.”

“I don’t either,” Clay said, indicating the baseball cards he was holding. 

“I was going to try to be the sporty dad, if Hannah was a boy, but, thankfully, she wasn’t, so I was saved from that,” Mr. Baker told him, looking at all the stuff. “I don’t think I could’ve forced myself to like something.”

“Yeah,” Clay agreed. “I'm… super glad my dad’s not a sports fan, because I hate physical activity.” 

“But you ride a bike everywhere,” Mr. Baker pointed out. 

“Oh, that's just because I don't know how to drive.” 

Mr. Baker rose to a standing position again. “You don't?” 

“No,” Clay said, shaking his head. “I didn't see the need for it. It's a small town, and… I don't do cars.” 

“Well, that's good to know.” They both turned to see Tony leaning against the doorway, arms crossed. He grinned at Clay. “For future reference, so I don't bore you by talking about my car.” 

“Your car’s different,” Clay said, quickly. “I love hearing about your car.” 

Tony shook his head, still smiling, and he looked at Mr. Baker. “Do you need me to take him away? Sometimes he doesn't know when to stop a conversation.” 

Mr. Baker looked between him and Clay, who kicked at the ground. “I think we’re okay, Tony, thanks.” 

“If you're sure,” Tony replied. “Mrs. Baker said dinner will be ready, soon.” 

With that, he winked at Clay and then left the garage. 

Clay exhaled, and looked at Mr. Baker, who was studying the shadow box he still held. “So, you and Tony, huh?” he finally asked, and Clay blanched. 

“It's… it's really not… a big deal,” he said. “We haven't labeled it, or anything.” 

“Well,” Mr. Baker said, clearing his throat and setting the shadow box back down. “I'm sure Hannah would be glad, knowing that the two of you are happy.” 

Clay managed a tiny smile. “Thanks.” 

Mr. Baker nodded, and gestured towards the memorabilia. “I'll pack all this up and find someone to auction it off, and let you know how much we make.” 

“Sure,” Clay replied. “Sounds good.” 

“Okay,” Mr. Baker said, and then he smiled. “If you ever want to talk about not liking sports, I'm your guy.” 

Clay grinned back. “I'll keep that in mind.” 

“So, you probably want to go catch up with Tony, talk a little before dinner.” Mr. Baker squatted down and started to gather the memorabilia. 

Clay turned to leave the garage, but then he paused and glanced over his shoulder. “Mr. Baker?” 

“Yeah, Clay.”

“Thanks,” he said, “for… talking to me about… stuff.”

Mr. Baker looked up at him, and smiled. “Thank you for letting me talk to you.” 

Clay nodded, and then he left the garage. 

~*~

“So, your parents aren’t home, huh?” Tony asked, closing Clay’s bedroom door behind him.

“Nope,” Clay answered, leaning over his computer in order to turn some soft music on, “and… they won’t be home for a few hours, either. At least, my dad won’t be. Not so sure about my mom.”

“We have the whole house to ourselves, then?” Clay nodded, and Tony grinned. “We should throw a kegger.”

“Yeah, totally,” Clay agreed, mocking the frat boy voice that Tony had fabricated. 

“Until your dad gets home,” Tony added. 

“In like, three hours,” Clay finished. They both laughed, and then Clay said, “Thank you, for coming over. I didn’t really want to be home alone.”

“Yeah, well, it’s not like I’ve wanted to come over for a month now, or anything, but you’ve turned me down every time,” Tony said, settling down on the edge of Clay’s bed. 

“You know my parents,” Clay told him. “They’d just make it super weird, and awkward.”

Tony sighed. “Clay -”

“Hey, so, I have a few ideas for the movie theatres that I wanted to ask you about, because you’re better at organizing things than I am, so…” Clay trailed off when he saw the expression on Tony’s face. “What?” 

“We need to talk,” Tony said, and Clay deflated. 

“You want to end this,” he mumbled, and Tony frowned at him. 

“What?” 

“I mean, that’s why you came over right? To… break up with me, or whatever it is people do to their not-official significant other.”

“Clay, I’m not breaking up with you,” Tony said. 

“I know! I shouldn’t be so presumptuous, because we’re not even dating officially so how could you break up with me?” Tony stared at him funny, and Clay pressed on, “Go ahead, you can tell me whatever you need to tell me. I’m not gonna like, cry or anything, even though I might want to.”

“Clay,” Tony said, and he stood up to take his hands. “I’m  _ not  _ breaking up with you.”

“Okay,” Clay breathed, relaxing slightly. He patted Tony’s hands. “Thank you.”

Tony smirked, and patted Clay’s hands right back. “You’re welcome.” Clay looked at him, and Tony said, “What I was going to say is that I don’t want to keep this a secret anymore.”

Clay was horrified. “What? Why not? Wh-why?” 

“Why are we even hiding?” Tony answered his question with one of his own, and Clay shrugged. 

“I just… I just thought people might not like it if they found out that Hannah’s best friend was dating her ‘unrequited crush’,” he explained, quietly. “I didn’t want anyone thinking that we were… I don’t know, being assholes to her memory, or whatever.”

“Why wouldn’t people want us to be happy?” Tony asked him. “Because, that’s what we are, right? Happy?”

“I think so,” Clay said, and then quickly amended, “I  _ hope _ so.”

“Clay, listen to me,” Tony started, moving his hands up so that he was gripping Clay’s biceps. “You don’t have to keep trying to convince me to stay with you.”

“I wasn’t -”

“You don’t have to worry about you not being enough, because… this is good,” Tony assured him, and Clay swallowed back his argument. “So… why don’t we just focus on  _ us _ ? Can we try that? I mean, it isn’t as though Hannah brought us together, or anything. We were friends before all this, and now we’re more than friends.” He place one hand on the side of Clay’s head. “So, stop listening to whatever’s telling you that we have to consider Hannah, too, because we can’t compete with that.”

Clay leaned into Tony’s hand, smiling slightly, and Tony returned it. “Just us. That’s all that it needs to be,” he concluded, moving away to sit on Clay’s bed once more. 

“I’m sorry,” Clay said to him, and Tony raised an eyebrow. “I just… I never thought that you might… feel the same way about me, you know? So… I guess I just feel like I have to give you a bunch of different reasons why we should be together, despite everything, but… if you really just… like me, because I’m me, then that’s all I need to know.” 

Tony nodded. “I like you because you’re you, Clay,” he said, plainly. 

Clay grinned, and moved over to the bed. “So we can just worry about us, then,” he responded. “Just… just you and me, and that’s… that’s all.”

Tony held out his hand, and Clay took it, allowing Tony to pull him down onto the bed beside him. He looked down at their entwined fingers, and felt his heart rate increase to a dangerous speed. 

And then one of Tony’s hands was cupping his face, and he looked up to meet his gaze. “Let the rest of the world fall away,” Tony murmured, hazel eyes glittering. “It’s just you and me.”

“Just you and me,” Clay agreed, and then he closed the remaining space between them. Tony relaxed back onto the bed, bringing Clay down with him, and Clay allowed himself to relax as well. 

_ Nothing else matters _ , he thought to himself. 


	8. Good For You

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's a rather long version of Good For You because holy shit there is a lot of acting before that song in the musical.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I own nothing, I see nothing, and I hear nothing.

“Clay!” 

He stopped walking towards where his bike was chained up, and saw Jeff hurrying towards him, a pathway breaking open through the students in his way, to allow him through. It was then that Clay realized that, in his all his eagerness to finally have a night at his house with Tony, alone, he’d completely forgotten about his planned meeting with Jeff. 

“Where were you, dude?” the baseball player asked, coming to a stop in front of him. “I waited for like an hour.”

“I’m so sorry,” Clay said. “I… I completely forgot about it. I had a project, and I needed to finish it before English today… shit, Jeff, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t worry,” Jeff sighed after a moment. “I was able to get it all worked out by myself. But I need to know what’s been up with you, lately. The money’s due in a week.”

“I know, I know, and I… I’ve just -”

“I feel like you’re not even here anymore, sometimes,” Jeff said. “You haven’t made a new video since the one talking about the fundraiser, you haven’t even posted a short statement about how it’s going or anything.”

“I just… I’ve been busy,” Clay said.

“With what?” 

“Just… schoolwork, like I said,” Clay responded. “Hey, how much money do we have left to raise?”

“$10,000 or something like that, I think,” Jeff answered. “Skye sent me an update last night, and it was a little over.”

“So, that’s not so bad,” Clay said, mock cheerfully. “We just need to think of a way to keep people engaged.”

“Exactly, which is why I’m going to put you and Hannah’s emails on the page,” Jeff said. 

Clay stopped putting in his bike lock combination, and looked up at Jeff again. “What?”

“Mrs. Baker gave them to me,” Jeff explained. “She’s said there’s a ton of them, that you keep bringing her more and more every time she sees you.”

“But those conversations are really private,” Clay said quickly. 

“And that’s what people want to see,” Jeff said. “They want to see that you two were close, that you were helping her, you know? You have a responsibility to these people, to tell them the truth about you and Hannah.”

“I do?”

“I’m going to send you a list of questions that people have been asking, too,” Jeff added, as though Clay hadn’t spoken. “Just answer them honestly, and it should make people happy, okay?” 

Clay swallowed and watch Jeff trot away, before looking down at his bike lock. The emails. That was okay. It wasn’t as though anything super revealing was in them, right? The worst thing for Jeff to put on the page would be the first letter, and Clay didn’t even think Jeff remembered that, so it was fine. 

It was  _ fine _ .

“Hey, top dog.” Clay glanced up at Skye’s voice, and found her standing across the bike rack from him. “So, my parents aren’t going to be home this weekend, and they haven’t touched their alcohol stash since everyone thought the world was going to end in 1999, so we can drink whatever we want to.”

“I can’t this weekend,” Clay told her, looking back down at his bike lock. “I have $10,000 to raise. That’s how much is left for the fundraiser, right? You’ll help, won’t you?”

Skye frowned at him. “Don’t you remember telling me that you don’t need any help?”

Clay was exasperated. “Look, I know you think this is all just a big joke or whatever, but it’s not, okay? It’s… it’s important.” He started to fiddle with his bike lock again. 

“For Hannah,” Skye concluded, studying him. 

“Yeah,” Clay answered, finally getting the lock undone and freeing his bike. 

“Y’know, the funniest thing about all this, to me, is that Hannah being dead is probably the best thing that’s ever happened to you, isn’t it?” Skye asked him. 

Clay’s head shot up. “Why would you even say something like that?” he demanded. 

“Think about it,” Skye said. “If Hannah hadn’t killed herself, people would still have no idea who you are. I mean, other kids actually talk to you now, right? Kids you hadn’t even thought knew your name are your biggest fans. You’re actually sort of popular, now, which is something that neither of us ever thought was going to happen.”

“I don’t care about that,” Clay said, quickly. “I don’t care if people like me, now. What matters is that I help the Bakers.”

“Help the Bakers,” Skye said, shaking her head. “Yeah, you’re doing a great job of that, aren’t you? Going over to their house for dinner and all that. I’m sure that’s helping them  _ a lot _ .”

Someone honked their horn, and they both turned to see Tony had pulled up in his Mustang. He waved at them, and Skye snorted to herself before looking at Clay. “You sure you’re not just helping yourself?”

Before he could reply, she turned and walked away, leaving Clay to stare after her for a moment before shaking his head and pushing his bike towards the Mustang. He put it in the trunk, and then climbed into the passenger’s seat, pulling off his backpack. 

“What were you and Skye talking about?” Tony asked him. 

“Just… Hannah Project, stuff,” Clay answered absently. “Don’t worry about it.” He looked at Tony, and managed a smile. “Hi.”

Tony laughed. “Hi.” 

“Are we going to your house or -”

“I thought you said you wanted to go to the Bakers’,” Tony replied, putting the car in gear. 

“Oh, yeah, but… I figured that wouldn’t be until tonight, so… what do we do while we wait?” 

Tony grinned slightly. “I think we can figure something out.”

~*~

Lainie accepted the wine glass that Mr. Baker had just poured for her. “Thank you,” she said, taking a sip of it. 

“I was glad to hear that you weren’t too busy to eat with us, tonight,” Mrs. Baker said, joining her on the couch with a glass of her own. “We heard from Clay that you’re a lawyer, and that you’re always pretty busy.”

“I am,” Lainie said, “but… I try to be home as much as possible.” She took another drink of her wine as Mr. Baker settled down on a sitting chair, and then she said, “I was glad to get your call, though. I wasn’t just if it was okay of me to reach out.”

“We didn’t either,” Mrs. Baker explained. “Clay’s just been such a big help these past few months, so we wanted to thank you for letting him be apart of our lives.”

“How much time does Clay spend here?” Lainie asked, glancing between the two of them, and the Bakers exchanged a look. 

“I don’t know if I could say, exactly,” Mrs. Baker finally said. “It’s no problem that he’s here as often as he is, though.”

“We appreciate him, a lot,” Mr. Baker added. “He’s… he’s been a big source of comfort since Hannah died.”

“Yes, the two of them were very close,” Mrs. Baker said. 

“Right,” Lainie replied. “You know, the funny thing is that I had no idea about their friendship until… well -”

“Neither did we!” Mr. Baker said, quickly. 

“Hannah liked to keep her secrets,” Mrs. Baker said, “but Clay was probably the biggest one. 

Lainie felt slightly relieved by this news. “Clay didn’t tell me anything.”

“They shared so much with one another. Hannah told him things about herself that I didn’t even know about,” Mrs. Baker said. 

There was a knock on the front door, and Mr. Baker rose to go answer it. Mrs. Baker smiled. “That’s probably the boys.”

“Oh,” Lainie said, standing when she heard the front door open. 

“We invited your mother to have dinner with us, tonight, too,” she heard Mr. Baker say, and thought she could hear Clay’s instant panic, too. 

Mr. Baker led the way back into the sitting room, Clay and Tony behind him. Clay’s eyes landed on his mother, and he balked. 

“They invited your dad, too, but he had to work,” Lainie told him.

“I-I thought you were working tonight, too,” Clay stammered. 

“I was, but I thought that this was more important,” Lainie responded. “I had no idea that you were going to be here, either, so -”

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,” Tony said, moving from Clay’s side. “Good to see you again, Mrs. Jensen.”

“Hello, Tony,” Lainie replied, smiling at him.

“You knew about this?” Clay managed, and Tony turned to look at him. 

“It was my idea,” he said. 

“Why don’t you boys sit down?” Mr. Baker suggested, gesturing to the other couch. Clay collapsed onto it, while Tony sat down with a bit more grace, and Lainie retook her own seat beside Mrs. Baker, who smiled at Clay. 

“We were just talking about how none of us knew that you and Hannah were as close as you were.”

“Something… smells good,” Clay injected before the conversation could go that route. 

“Lasagna,” Mrs. Baker told him. 

“I hadn’t realized you were spending so much time here,” Lainie said, and Clay winced. “Why did I think you were always with Tony, or Jeff?” 

“Well, I was. With Tony. Or Jeff,” Clay told her. 

“He’s not wrong,” Mr. Baker agreed. “Tony and Jeff have been around a lot, too, since Jeff is co-president of the Hannah Project, and Tony was one of Hannah’s friends as well.”

“I knew that,” Lainie said, looking at Tony, who nodded. 

“Clay’s been helping me understand that it wasn’t all my fault, even though I thought it was.”

“Why’s that?” Lainie asked, frowning, and Clay jumped in before this could get any worse.

“Mom, what, uh… what’s Dad going to make himself for dinner?” 

“I imagine he’ll just have cereal or something once he gets home, tonight,” Lainie answered, tilting her head. 

“Clay said he’s a professor?” Mrs. Baker queried, and Lainie nodded. 

“He has quite a few night classes that he likes to change around, in order to keep his students on his toes.” She looked at Clay again. “Tonight, though, he was going to see about scholarships for Clay.”

“Oh, that’s great!” Mrs. Baker said, looking at Clay as well. “He’s very smart.”

“I know,” Lainie said. 

Clay reached over and took Tony’s hand in order to support himself. Thankfully, Tony didn’t seem to mind. 

Mrs. Baker glanced at Mr. Baker. “Andy? Do you think we should -?”

“I suppose now’s as good a time as any,” Mr. Baker replied, and he took her wine glass for her and set both his and hers down on the side table next to his chair. “Do you want to tell him?”

“Well,” Mrs. Baker began, looking at Clay. “We were going through Hannah’s things again, yesterday, and we… we remembered that she’d set up an account, for college money. There’s… quite a bit in there, and… we wanted to know if you wanted us to put it towards the restoration funds.”

“Wh-why are you asking me?” Clay asked, frowning. “It… it’s Hannah’s money, so it’s technically your money. You should do whatever you want with it.”

“We know,” Mr. Baker said, “but we thought you might like to know, before we made up our minds. If you’d rather just keep raising the money on your own -”

Clay looked between the two of them. “Whatever you want,” he finally said, glancing down towards where his hand was tightly holding Tony’s. “It shouldn’t really be up to me.”

“Why not?” Mrs. Baker asked. “We know that you’ve really been trying hard to raise the money on your own -”

“When have you had time to do that?” Tony injected, looking at him. “I thought you said you were busy with an English project, and that you’d let Jeff take over the fundraiser for a while.”

“I mean, I did, sort of,” Clay responded, noticing the expression on his mother’s face. 

“Wait, you haven’t been working on the fundraiser?” Mr. Baker asked, frowning. 

“I have been, just not extensively,” Clay answered. 

“Actually, now that you brought it up, Tony, I haven’t seen a post from Clay in a long time, on the page,” Mrs. Baker said. “Have you really been that busy with school work?” 

“And other things,” Clay told her. 

“Like what?” Lainie questioned, setting her own wine glass down. 

“Just… other things, I don’t know,” Clay said, looking down again, only this time, he couldn’t look at his and Tony’s clasped hands, because Tony was no longer holding his hand. 

“What’ve you been up to, Clay?” he asked him, frowning in confusion. 

“I don’t know!” Clay exclaimed. “I’ve been spending a lot of time with you.”

“Yeah, but when you’re not with me, what are you doing?” Tony persisted. 

“I-I…” Clay trailed off, and Lainie rose to her feet again. 

“Clay, I think you and I need to go home,” she said to him. 

“Mom -”

“Mrs. Jensen, you don’t have to go,” Mrs. Baker said, and Lainie shook her head. 

“I think we do, because my son hasn’t been telling me what he’s been up to, and we need to have a talk about that. While I’m not  _ too busy _ .”

With that, she turned and headed for the front door, holding her bag against her shoulder. “Come on, Clay.”

He submissively rose from the couch, apologizing hastily to the Bakers, and to Tony, before going after his mother. 

The ride home was absurdly silent, and Clay knew it was just because his mother was preparing for the explosion as soon as they got home. 

He was right. 

Almost as soon as the door was shut behind them, his mother rounded on him. “Do you have any idea how mortifying it is to find out that your son has been spending all his time with a different set of parents, people who you know nothing about?”

Clay didn’t respond, and so Lainie pressed on. “You told me you were at Jeff’s, or Tony’s, or even  _ Skye’s _ . You never, not once, mentioned the Bakers to me. Never.”

“If you and Dad are never here, then why does it matter where I am?” Clay asked, glancing at her. 

“Uh… they think you’re… I don’t know, their replacement child or something. These people -”

“They’re not people, they’re Hannah’s parents.”

“Exactly! They’re  _ Hannah’s _ parents, Clay, not yours.”

“They take care of me.”

“But they’re not your parents! That’s not your family! You’re family is right here, in this house, and they are worried about you,” Lainie informed him. “Your dad and I are  _ worried _ about, because we’ve had to rely on a  _ webpage _ to know what you’ve been doing for almost two months, now!”

“That’s exactly it!” Clay shouted. “The Bakers know what I’ve been up to, and they’re really nice to me.”

“I know! They’re lovely people. I’ve shopped at their store more than once. But they don’t know you, Clay.”

“And you do?”

Lainie scoffed. “I thought I did.”

“What do you know about me, Mom? Nothing, you don’t know  _ anything _ ,” Clay exclaimed as she took a few steps away from him, hands on her hips, “because you haven’t been here!”

“I’ve tried my best, but you push me away, act as though you don’t need to talk to me about anything!” Lainie cried. “I ask you if you’re okay, and you give me one word answers and brush me off. How am I supposed to know you if you won’t let me try?” 

Clay inhaled sharply. “Like you care. The only thing you ever want to know about me is if I need to go see Dr. Ellman, or if I need to take more drugs. The Bakers treat me like a normal kid. They don’t act like there’s something wrong with me that I have to fix!”

“Clay! I did all that for you! You were in a dark place, and then you got out of it!” Lainie said. 

“Yeah, but not because of a prescription or a therapist, Mom,” Clay responded. 

“All I wanted to do was help you, and I thought I was,” Lainie sighed, putting her hand against her forehead. 

Clay gazed at her for a moment. “Well, it’s not my fault if… if other people can help me better than you can,” he mumbled at last, and then he sank down onto the couch, and put his head between his hands.

Lainie gaped at him. “Well, then I hope you’re proud of what you’re doing,” she said. “I hope you’re getting what you wanted out of it, because clearly you’re so much better off.” She shook her head. “You… you say whatever you have to so that you can just… leave, because apparently you’re so much better off anywhere other than here.” 

“Mom -” Clay started, lifting his head, but Lainie didn’t acknowledge him. 

“Thank God you found people to rescue you, since I couldn’t do it myself. I’m glad your dreams are coming true. Good for you.” 

Without another word, she stalked out of the room, leaving Clay to sit in silence, accompanied by nothing but his own, frenzied thoughts. 

~*~

The next day at school, things only got worse. 

Jeff cornered Clay early on in the day with a very abrupt question: “Why did Hannah kill herself?” 

Clay blinked at him. “What?” 

“She was doing just fine. In fact, she was  _ happy _ , or so she said in the emails she sent to you,” Jeff responded. “Why would she say she was happy, and then a month later kill herself, Clay? None of these emails make any fucking sense.”

“Well, a lot of stuff doesn’t make sense!” Clay said hotly. “Things are messy, and complicated, and… and I already told you that Hannah was really good at hiding her feelings, didn’t I?”

Jeff gazed at him for a moment. “This has to do with Tony, doesn’t it? Hannah killed herself because of him, because he didn’t love her, and now you’re dating him, or whatever it is you’re doing. Do you know what people are going to think, if they find that out?” 

“But they’re not going to, because I already said that I didn’t want Tony to be part of the Hannah Project unless he wants to be, and he said he doesn’t,” Clay reminded him. “And why do you even care so much about this, anyway? I thought you didn’t even know Hannah.”

“It’s not just about Hannah -”

“No, right, right, it’s about… about all the kids just like Hannah,” Clay said, throwing his hands into the air. “Well, did you ever think, for a second, that the kids who are just like Hannah are the ones you might be talking about exposing to the followers on the page?” 

“You mean like me?” Jeff asked, softly, and Clay looked at him. “I know what it’s like, to feel like there’s nothing left, Clay, but I  _ fixed _ it. I didn’t have a support system, but I  _ fixed _ it, and I want everyone to know that they can fix it to, if they really want to.” He shook his head. “Aren’t you sorry? For… for giving those people that video and then not… continuing to be supportive, to everyone who pops up on the page every day, asking for help?”

“What are you -”

“Do you even care that you might be wrong about, about Hannah being good at hiding her feelings? Maybe something set her off on that last day, and you just refuse to tell anyone what it was. Maybe it actually does have to do with Tony, but you’re so worried about protecting him that you won’t admit it!” Jeff shook his head. “I hope you had a blast playing pretend, Clay, and I hope you’re glad that I got dragged along for the ride.”

“Jeff,” Clay started, but he was already walking away. “Fuck. Fuck!”

He pulled out his cell phone and quickly texted Skye.

Not three minutes later, he received a text from Jeff.

“Shit,” Clay cursed. 

~*~

Back at home, Clay walked into his house to find both his parents seated at the kitchen table, waiting for him. 

His mother was the only one to speak. “We’ve decided we’re just going to sit back and let you do whatever you want. Is that good for you?”

Clay, who wasn’t in the mood, merely shook his head in response and raced away upstairs. 

How had everything started going wrong so fast, without giving him anytime to think? It felt like everything was about the sink to the bottom of the ocean, and there was nothing he could do to take any of it back. It was like he’d written everything in ink, and now he couldn’t change his story. 

He could take  _ none _ of it back. The train that had been his fabrication, and going full speed less than 24 hours ago, was currently getting ready to jump the track, and Clay felt like he was about to crack into pieces. 

_ I have to stop it. I have to let myself out of this, before it gets to be too late. _

Then, his phone buzzed in three times, in rapid succession. Pulling it out, he found three identical text messages waiting for him, one from each of the people who were ready to see his world crash and burn. 

_ You got what you always wanted _ . 

Clay dropped his phone to the floor and collapsed backwards onto his bed with a groan, covering his eyes with his arm. What had he done? 


	9. You Will Be Found (Reprise)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's the part where everything goes to shit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really don't own anything, I swear.

“I can’t do this anymore,” Clay murmured to himself, holding his head between his hands.

“You can’t just stop now,” Hannah told him, sitting down on the floor in front of him.

“I can’t… I can’t do this anymore,” Clay repeated, refusing to look at her.

“What about my parents? You can’t do this to them,” Hannah insisted.

“No more emails,” Clay whispered, cupping his hands over his ears. “No more Hannah Project, no more theatres, nothing, nothing nothing!”

“After everything they’ve done for you, you’re just going to drop them?” Hannah demanded. “They fed you when your own parents weren’t home to do it, Clay. They care about you, because you’re supposed to care about me!”

“But I can’t do it anymore!” Clay shouted, jumping up and walking away from her. “I can’t keep lying to them!”

“The lying is the only thing keeping them together,” Hannah said, following his movement across his room.

“That’s not true,” Clay muttered back.

“Oh really? So, they were just a happy couple when you met them, right?” Hannah questioned.

“I don’t want to _lie_ anymore!”

“What about Tony?” This brought Clay to a pause. “If you stop pretending, you lose him.”

“No, no.” Clay shook his head, rapidly. “No, he told me that our relationship has nothing to do with you.”

“Right.”

“Yes, yes, he said he likes me for me!” Clay told her.

“Except this isn’t who you are, is it, Clay?” Hannah demanded. “Everything you told him, it’s all big one big fucking lie. Did you mention that to him, during one of your many conversations about feelings?”

“So… even if I did tell him the truth, if I told him that your letter was actually my letter -”

“He’d hate you.”

“No, no, not if I explain it all,” Clay said quickly, moving to retrieve his cell phone from where it sat on his desk, turned off to avoid anymore backlash from people who he’d thought were his friends.

“Clay, you’ll go right back to where you started,” Hannah told him, watching as he turned his phone on. “Pining after him, afraid to tell him anything, afraid to tell _anyone_ anything. Do you really want to go back to that?”

“I just want to be done with this,” Clay stated, firmly.

“Then why are you here in your room, talking to yourself?” Hannah asked him. “Again?” Clay didn’t respond. “Do you really think you can just turn around all of a sudden, and start telling everyone the truth, when you can’t even tell yourself the truth?”

“What are you talking about?” Clay asked, looking at her.

Hannah tilted her head. “Why were you going to a therapist before all this, Clay? Why were you taking an antidepressant?”

“Because my mom thought I needed to,” Clay answered, glancing down at the ground.

“Really?” Hannah took a step towards him. “Because I think it’s because you did need help, because you did something, like I did, but you _failed_. I think you refuse to admit to yourself that you tried to kill yourself, and you refuse to admit to yourself it’s because you thought nobody wanted you.”

Clay swallowed, and Hannah went on: “Look, you can get rid of me whenever you want. You can get rid of the Hannah Project, the movie theatre restorations whenever you want. But all you’ll have left is you.”

He shook his head, hard, and Hannah placed a hand on his shoulder. “End of May? Early June? Early in the afternoon, I came to visit you at the Crestmont? Remember? We climbed on the roof, and watched the clouds, and I told you that I didn’t want to be anywhere else.”

Clay shook his head again, and Hannah offered his shoulder a gentle squeeze. “Think about it.”

When Clay opened his eyes again, she was gone, and he’d made up his mind.

So, exhaling, he texted Jeff.

As soon as Jeff stopped responding, Clay hurriedly opened the Hannah Project page, and his heart thudded to an abrupt stop. There, at the very top of the page, the newest post from Jeff Atkins, co-president.

“No,” Clay said. “No, no, no!”

But he had no idea about how bad it was going to get.

First the comments started rolling in, and then the posts. And then people were making videos of themselves ranting about the letter, about how Clay should’ve told somebody, about how her parents should have realized something was wrong, about how Tony was an asshole for letting her go on like this without doing anything about it.

_I can’t believe this._

_She wrote her suicide note to Clay Jensen because she knew her parents wouldn’t do anything to help her._

_… “all my hope is currently invested in Tony…”..._

_Why didn’t this Tony see that something was wrong with her?_

_Clay should’ve taken this letter straight to a guidance counselor or something as soon as he got it._

_Hannah Baker’s parents did nothing to show her daughter that they were there to help her._

_The only person she says she could trust was Tony, so why didn’t he try to help her?_

_Who even is Tony? Hannah talks about him in her emails, but it’s mostly just stupid girl shit that a girl with a crush notices. She never said anything about him being one her other close friends._

_“... no one ever seems to want to have a normal conversation with me.” What does she mean? Didn’t she have Clay to talk to?_

_I thought that the whole point of this project was to show that everyone has a least one person who cares about them?_

_If Hannah didn’t actually have Clay, then who do I have?_

_We should go to the Bakers’ house -_

_\- find out where Tony lives -_

_If Clay Jensen couldn’t help Hannah Baker, then no one can help anyone._

Clay lay in his bed, watching it all just pile on, more and more and more hate directed at him, at Tony, at Mr. and Mrs. Baker, at the kid who’d taken the letter in the first place.

And just when he thought he couldn’t take anymore of it, his phone rang.

“Hello?” he said timidly, and he heard a small sigh on the other end. “Tony?”

“You need to come to the Bakers’ house,” Tony said quietly. “Now.”

“What’s going on? Are they okay? Have they -”

“They’ve seen it, Clay,” Tony answered. “Just come. I don’t have anything else to say to you over the phone.”

And the line went dead.

Clay dropped his phone to his bed and covered his face with his hands.

 _What have I done_?


	10. Words Fail

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's Words Fail, but a tad less emotional than I intended.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't own anything.

“Did you tell Jeff he could put this online?” Mr. Baker asked, and Clay shook his head. 

“No, of course not! I just… I told him the whole story, that’s all.” He looked down at his phone. “I want him to take down the post, but he’s not responding to any of my messages.”

“Some of these people are adults,” Mrs. Baker said, scrolling through the comments. “Do you see their pictures, Andy? These people are  _ adults _ .”

Tony’s phone rang, and, instead of answering it, he merely shut it off, without looking up once. The thought of how many hate calls all three of them had received made Clay sick to his stomach. 

“I’m calling the police,” Mrs. Baker decided, snatching up her cell phone from the table. 

“What do you think they’re going to do, Olivia?” Mr. Baker demanded, reaching over to grab the phone before she could dial. “Maybe the best thing to do is wait and see if this blows over.”

“That’s always it with you,” Mrs. Baker exclaimed. “You never want to do anything! When I told you I was worried about Hannah, you said that you thought she was acting just fine, that nothing was wrong with her!”

“She never gave me any reason to believe there was something wrong with her!” Mr. Baker retorted. “Besides, what can the police do? It’s the internet, Olivia. Anyone can say whatever they want to on the internet.”

“Do you really think they’ll stop?” Clay asked, softly, but neither of them were listening. 

“I told you, over and over again, that Hannah needed our help. Look at this!” Mrs. Baker cried, gesturing to the computer. “Even complete strangers realize that our daughter needed help!” 

“It isn’t my fault that I couldn’t see it!” Mr. Baker told her. “I tried so hard to see what you could see, but I couldn’t. All I saw was our daughter, our beautiful daughter, just going through her teenage years. It isn’t my fault that she couldn’t make it through them!”

“But if you’d just listened to me -”

“I did, and we asked Hannah if she wanted help, and she said no! What else were we supposed to do?” 

“We could’ve tried harder,” Mrs. Baker whispered. “We could’ve forced her to talk to us.”

“That would’ve just pushed her away even further, and you know it,” Mr. Baker informed her. “And Clay’s emails with her -”

“The emails, Andy? Honestly? You think that some emails can dictate just what our daughter was feeling? An email is written word. It’s nothing like a real conversation!” Mrs. Baker rested her head heavily in her hands. “Why didn’t you tell someone, Clay?”

“W-what?” 

“Why didn’t you tell someone as soon as you got the letter from her? Why  _ didn’t  _ you got to a counselor, or the principal, or someone?” Mrs. Baker demanded. 

“Leave him alone, Olivia,” Mr. Baker sighed. “I’m sure Clay did everything he could. It isn’t his fault that some kid got ahold of the letter and sent it around the school.”

Mrs. Baker exhaled, slowly. “He’s right,” she said, softly, and then she looked at Clay. “I’m sorry, Clay. You did everything you could think to do. I’m sure it was a shock, to get this letter from Hannah after only getting happy ones beforehand, ones that gave you no reason to worry.”

“It’s okay,” Clay replied, meekly, wishing Tony would look at him. He was just sitting at the table, his hands folded on top of it in front of him, and gazing down at them. He hadn’t spoken a single word since Clay had arrived at the house. 

“The point it, Hannah was fine, and she might not have even decided to hurt herself had that kid not taken the letter. She was fine,” Mr. Baker continued. 

“We failed her,” Mrs. Baker murmured, almost to her herself.

“You didn’t fail her,” Clay interjected, not wanting her to even go down that road, because it was the last thing the Bakers did. 

“What are you talking about?” Mrs. Baker exclaimed. “You saw what she wrote -”

“She didn’t write it!” Clay shouted. 

A hush fell over the room. 

“Sh-she didn’t write it,” Clay whispered. “I did.”

Mrs. Baker looked at her husband, and then she closed her eyes momentarily. “You didn’t write Hannah’s last letter to you, Clay,” she said, softly. 

“It wasn’t her last letter to me,” he told her. “It… it was a letter I wrote to myself. It was supposed to be like a pep talk.  _ Dear Clay Jensen, today is gonna be a good day, and here’s why _ . Except, I didn’t have a good day, the day I wrote it, and so… so that happened, instead.” 

“Then… how did…?”

“Hannah found me in the library, while I was writing it. She… she read it, and insisted that I needed to… to tell someone,” Clay managed, his eyes flickering over to Tony, who’d finally looked up. “Before I could get the printed one back from her, someone took a picture of it, and sent it to half the school.” 

He closed his eyes. “I guess… I guess Hannah must’ve… must’ve decided she couldn’t take the repercussions of people thinking she’d wrote it, and… and so she killed herself.”

“What are you talking about, Clay?” Mrs. Baker asked. 

“We weren’t friends, Hannah and I,” Clay said, turning his gaze downwards. 

“No,” Mrs. Baker whispered, realization suddenly settling in. She shook her head at him, and placed a hand over her mouth. “No, no, no!”

“I never met for it to go this far,” Clay whispered, barely able to speak past the lump that had formed in his throat. “And… now I just stand here sorry, searching for something to say, but… words fail. There’s… there’s nothing I can say.”

“So it was your letter, the whole time.” He looked up at Tony’s voice and found him watching him. “I knew it, and you lied to me.”

“I just… I wanted to be part of this,” Clay responded, looking at all three of them. “I never had this kind of thing before. I… you’re perfect, Tony, and you somehow saw the good part of me.” He gestured to Mr. Baker. “And you… just… being a dad, and…” He turned to Mrs. Baker. “... you being a mom. My parents… they’re just so busy, all the time, and they’re never there for me, except when it’s good for them.”

“Clay -”

“I know that’s not a good explanation. Nothing can explain all the things I’ve done,” Clay interrupted hurriedly, wanting to get it all out. “But… sometimes, you see everything you’ve wanted and wished you had right there in front of you, and you want to believe it’s true, so you make it that way.” He closed his eyes tightly. “And you think, maybe, everybody wants it, and needs it, a little bit, too.”

Mrs. Baker was the first one to stand up and leave the kitchen, hands over her face. After a moment, Mr. Baker followed her, glancing at Clay for a moment before shaking his head and walking away from him. 

That left Clay and Tony, and Clay started towards him, but Tony stood up from the table, gazed at him for a moment, and then bowed his head and walked out of the room, his hands buried deep in his pockets. 

Clay stood where he was for a moment, and then he closed his eyes and pushed his way blindly out of the Bakers’ home, clambered onto his bike, and pedaled away. 

Once he’d gotten to his own house, he ran up the stairs, pulled up a post on the Hannah Project page, and wrote out his resignation as co-president, along with why he was resigning. 


	11. So Big / So Small

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's sort of So Big / So Small, but not really, since Clay has a dad.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Eleven chapters in, and I still own nothing.

Clay lifted his head when there was a knock on his partially closed door, but lowered it back to his pillow when his mother pushed the door open wider with her knuckles. 

“Hey,” she greeted, remaining in the doorway. 

“Hi,” Clay responded tiredly. 

“I… I saw your post, on the Hannah Project page.” Clay closed his eyes, and felt his mother settle down on the edge of the bed. “Why didn't you tell me any of that, Clay?” 

“I thought it was pretty obvious how I feel about myself,” Clay mumbled. 

“I thought that you were feeling better?” Lainie asked. “Because of the Hannah Project, and what you were doing for it.” 

“I did, but that's because everything was a lie,” Clay replied. He turned his head so that his face was buried into the pillow. “I'm tired of lying, no matter what that means for me.” 

“Why?”

Clay hesitated for a moment, and then he turned again so that he could glance at his mother with one eye. “What do you mean?” 

“You could've kept lying,” Lainie said, “kept up the façade.” She tilted her head. “I know why you decided to stop lying, because… it really isn't you, but what I don't understand is what made you decide to stop the lie.” 

Clay gazed at her for a moment longer, and then he forced himself to sit up. “Because the lie was going to end up hurting more people than it would help,” he murmured, closing his eyes again. 

Lainie was silent for a moment, and then Clay felt her hand on his arm. “I'm proud of you, sweetheart,” she said, softly. 

“Why?” Clay asked. “I didn't… I didn't do anything good, I just stopped doing something that was bad.” 

“For the sake of others,” Lainie injected. Clay glanced at her. “Despite it all, you never stop thinking of everyone else. Even though you were lying mostly to profit yourself, you thought you were helping the Bakers, too.” She smiled at him. “And you stopped lying as soon as you realized it was beginning to hurt them.” 

“But now they’re hurting even more because they know I was lying,” Clay said. 

Lainie exhaled. “That's true, but… now that you're not lying to them anymore, they can actually begin to rebuild, instead of continue to reflect on your and Hannah’s relationship.”

“Fake relationship,” Clay sighed under his breath, and his mother rubbed her thumb against the back of his hand in a comforting gesture. 

“I'm sorry about the way I acted towards you,” she said, quietly. “I know that you… you were trying to fix the problems you have, by helping others fix their problems, and it worked. I saw a change in you, and it… it frustrated me.” 

“Why?” Clay asked. “I don't understand that part. As long as I was feeling better, what did it matter how it was happening?”

Lainie glanced downwards. “I guess I felt jealous, because another woman was being a better mother to you, than I've ever been, without even realizing it.” She shook her head to herself. “I know that's silly, but it's how I felt, and it made me angry, mostly with myself, but I lashed out at you, and I’m sorry for that.” 

Clay didn't respond, and Lainie reached out to pull him into a hug. He didn't resist. “I'm here now, I promise. And I'm not going anywhere. You need your mom, and that's what I'm going to be, until you feel like all these big problems are smaller, easier to manage ones.” 

Clay remained still for a moment, and then he carefully put his arms around his mother and hugged her, tightly, tears starting to flow freely. 

“I messed up, Mom,” he managed, hiding his face in her shoulder. “I messed up really bad.” 

“Shh, it's okay,” Lainie murmured, rubbing his back. “You might have made a mistake, but you did your best to fix it, and now all you can do is heal, and let the people you affected heal as well.” 

“I affected  _ so many people _ .” 

Lainie hesitated a moment before speaking: “How much of what you said in your speech did you mean?”

“What?” 

“Your speech, at the memorial assembly,” Lainie explained. “You said some pretty profound things, and I don't think it was all made up.”

Clay was silent, and Lainie hugged him tighter. “I think that you meant most of what you said. That you know that each person out there has someone who cares for them, very much.” 

“But -”

“Clay, even though you were talking about Hannah, and it wasn't true, it still meant a lot to people, people who needed to hear it, and then to have it be confirmed to them by those that love them,” Lainie concluded. “Those words… even if you didn't mean them for yourself… meant so much to everyone else.” 

Clay leaned away from her. “I hope so,” he said, quietly, “because I think I lost the person who I was actually talking about.” 

“Who’s that, honey?” Lainie asked him, frowning, and Clay turned his gaze downwards. 

“Tony.” 

“Oh.” Clay nodded wearily. “Clay, I'm sure if you just give him some time -”

“But I… I can't,” Clay answered, sounding more desperate than anything. “You read the letter, Mom. I need him.” He winced. “I  _ love _ him.”

Lainie was quiet for a few moments, and then she looked at him, and her heart broke for her son, who’d somehow managed to break his own heart, all by himself. And now he thought that the one person who could put it back together was never going to speak to him again. 

“Clay, honey,” she started, and he glanced at her. “I need you to promise me that you’ll try to heal, too. I'll do my best to help you in anyway I can, but… I think we’ve both learned that you handle it better on your own.” 

She squeezed his hands in her own. “Can you do that? For me? And for your dad, and yourself?” 

Clay stared at her for a moment, and then he said, very quietly, “I won't try to hurt myself again, if that's what you want to hear.” 

With that, he pulled his hands from hers and laid back down, covering his head with his pillow. 

Lainie remained where she was for a moment, and then she moved off of his bed. Careful not to make much noise, she retrieved his phone from where it lay, black and silent, on his desk, before walking out of his bedroom. 

She walked downstairs. Matt looked up from his iPad at her entrance into the kitchen. 

“How is he?” he asked as she sat down, and Lainie shook her head. 

“I don't know,” she replied honestly. “I wish I could read him better.”

“Why do you have his cell phone?” Matt asked her, and Lainie shook her head again. 

“I thought maybe I could come up with a way to help him, but I don't think -” She cut off as the phone suddenly flickered to life, and buzzed against the table, lighting up with a text message. 

She and Matt exchanged a glance, and then Lainie picked up the phone and examined the message. 

“Matt,” she said, passing the phone to him. He glanced at the message himself, and let out a breath.

“What do we tell him?” he asked, and Lainie took the phone back. 

“The truth,” she said, and then she typed out a response.

Lainie set the phone back down on the table and looked at Matt. “What did he say?” he asked. 

“He’s coming over for dinner,” Lainie answered with a small smile. “We’ll just have to see what happens from there.”

Matt was frowning. “Are you sure that’s a good idea? Especially since Clay isn’t doing too well.” 

“They’ll need to talk sooner or later, Matt,” Lainie responded. “Obviously, this is as soon as it can be, and maybe this will help Clay, one way or another. He may be able to move on, or maybe Tony wants to talk through it and try to fix things. We don’t know, and we won’t know until they actually have a conversation.”

“But -”

“It’s been two months.” Matt fell silent, and Lainie reached over to touch his hand. “I wish we could’ve helped him before now, but since we weren’t able to, this is the best way I can think of, now.”

“All right,” Matt sighed, leaning back in his chair and returning his attention to his iPad. “If you think this is a good idea, I’m not going to argue with you, because that never gets me anywhere.”

Lainie smiled at him. “It only took you seventeen years to admit it.”


	12. Finale

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's the Finale.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Finale, and I don't own any of it.

Dinner rolled around much more quickly than Clay anticipated, for when his mother came upstairs to fetch him for it, he hadn’t thought up his excuse for not joining his parents that evening. 

“I’m just too tired, Mom,” he supplied as an answered when she asked if he was going to eat with them. 

“I know, honey, but you have a visitor,” Lainie told him. 

Clay, who hadn’t thought anyone he knew would ever speak to him again, was surprised to hear this. So surprised, in fact, that he followed his mother down the stairs to the dining room, and froze as soon as he saw the fourth member of their dining party. 

Tony met his gaze, rather steadily, and he blinked, once. “Hey,” he greeted. 

“H-hi,” Clay managed, his voice cracking. He looked to his mother for an explanation, and she nodded towards Tony. 

“He said he wanted to talk to you.”

“Oh.” Clay looked down at the ground. “I… I don’t know if I want to talk.”

Lainie glanced at Matt, who was quietly studying his plate, trying not to seem as though he was listening to this increasingly awkward conversation. When she saw that she’d be getting no help from him, Lainie returned her attention to her son. 

“Clay, maybe it’s best if you talk to Tony,” she said. 

“I’m not going to yell or get angry,” Tony put in. “I just… we just need to talk a few things through, before we can move on.”

“Right,” Lainie agreed, and she reached over to touch Clay on the shoulder. Thankfully, he let her. “So, after dinner, you and Tony can talk. Your father and I will go somewhere else to give you two some time.”

“We will?” Matt asked, raising his gaze, and Lainie shot him a look before gesturing to a chair. 

“Sit,” she said to Clay, who sat. 

The dinner itself was very quiet. No one talked, much, aside from Lainie, who tried to start a few conversations every few minutes. None of the men at the table seemed up for conversation, however, so she, too, fell silent after a few attempts. 

After about half-an-hour, it seemed that everyone had drawn out their eating process as long as they possibly could have, and Matt was the first to wipe his mouth with his napkin and then drop it on his plate. 

“Well,” he said after a moment of silence. “Your mom and I will clear the table, and then we’ll get out of your hair, I guess.”

“Dad,” Clay moaned, looking up from his plate for the first time since he’d sat down. “No one says that anymore.”

“I just did,” Matt replied good naturedly, and then he picked up Clay’s plate, as well as his own, and carried both off to the kitchen. 

“You are done, aren’t you, Tony?” Lainie asked, and Tony nodded. 

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, and handed her his plate. 

Lainie stood up and exited the dining room as well, glancing over her shoulder once or twice to see if either Tony or Clay had made the first move. 

By the time she looked in there again, just before she and Matt left the house entirely, they were still sitting there. Clay was fiddling with the frayed edge of the place mat, and Tony was studying his silver ring. 

As soon as the front door had closed behind the adults, however, Tony spoke: “I don’t know if I want you to talk, while I’m talking.” Clay nodded, solemnly, and Tony cleared his throat. “All right. I read what you posted on the page, and… Clay, why didn’t you tell me that  _ that _ was how you felt?” 

Clay didn’t respond, and Tony tapped the table with his knuckles. “You can answer questions, Clay.”

“I didn’t want to tell anyone,” Clay murmured immediately. 

“Why not?” Tony asked. “It’s… it’s not good, to keep things like that bottle up inside you.” He exhaled. “How’ve you been doing?” 

“Not good.”

“Yeah, I guess that was kind of a stupid question, wasn’t it?” Tony huffed out something that might have been a laugh, and ran his hand through his hair. “Clay, you… you fucked up, for lack of better words, and it hurt a lot of people, including me. I know you know this, and I know you regret it, but… it was  _ bad _ .” 

Clay nodded, and Tony went on. “I know now, what was going through your head when you started this whole thing, but I wish you would’ve considered another route. You could’ve just told me.” 

Clay opened his mouth to speak, but didn’t, and Tony nodded, giving him permission. “Hannah said she was going to give the letter to you.”

“What?” Tony asked, frowning. 

“When Hannah found me writing the letter in the library, she read it, and she told me that I needed to tell you how I felt,” Clay explained. “So, she printed it, and I guess something inside me was thinking that maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea if she got it to you, because then you’d know, and you’d know it was me, because it was one of the letters you’d told me to write, so… I didn’t try that hard to stop her, and Montgomery took it from her, and it… went to shit from there, for lack of better words.”

Tony smiled slightly at that, and he looked down at the table. “I get it,” he said, softly, “but I really wish that you would’ve just told me, yourself, and maybe none of this would’ve happened.”

“Yeah,” Clay sighed under his breath. “So it really is all my fault, just not in the way everyone thought it was.”

Tony was silent for a moment. “I’m not going to agree or disagree with that, but I just… I don’t want anyone to blame themselves,” he finally said. “I… I blamed myself, for the longest time, until you convinced me that I shouldn’t. I don’t want anyone else to feel what I was feeling, even though I’m pretty sure the Bakers will never stop feeling it, themselves.”

Clay nodded, and Tony moved his own placemat so that it was more centered in front of him. “The point I want to make is that I forgive you, for what you decided to do, since I understand why, but… I just don’t know if I can help you anymore than that.”

“What?” Clay asked, weakly, and Tony sighed. 

“I don’t know if I can be what you want me to be, to you,” he said, quietly. “I don’t think… I don’t think I could ever feel that way about you, after what you did.” He then set his hand on the table, just a few centimeters from where Clay’s was. “But… I’m still here to support you, because I know you need me to do that, at least.” 

Clay had his eyes squeezed shut, clearly holding back tears. Tony wished he could feel more sympathy, but he didn’t. “I’m sorry, Clay, but… you did really fuck up. You made everyone’s hurt come back, just as fresh. And I’m glad you did it then, before letting it go on further, but… it really would’ve helped if you hadn’t of done it at all.”

Clay forced himself to nod, and Tony hesitated a moment before withdrawing his hand and putting both in his lap. “I’m sorry.”

“I am, too,” Clay murmured, and then he let out a long breath, eyes still closed. When he finally opened them, he saw that Tony was merely sitting across from him, watching. “I… I can still talk to you, though, whenever I need to?”

“Always,” Tony answered immediately. 

Clay was quiet for a moment. “Okay,” he said, quietly. “Because I just need you and me, even if it’s not really the same as it was.”

“Are you sure?” Tony asked him, and Clay nodded again, more firmly this time. “All right. Then you’ll have us.”

“I’ll have us,” Clay repeated under his breath a few times, like he was chanting a mantra to himself. “I’ll have us, I’ll have us, the rest of the world doesn’t matter.”

“Clay, I can’t be the only thing that you hold on to,” Tony told him. “It won’t fix anything, if you do that. Instead, it’ll go back to the way it was, and that isn’t what we want to do, is it?” 

“But I only want you,” Clay whispered. 

Tony started to respond, and then he forced himself to stop, before he made it worse. “I know,” he said, quietly. “I get it, but… I can’t be the only thing that you want, Clay, because… because you’re never going to have me, the way you want.”

Clay closed his eyes again, and Tony went on, “I really need you to focus on something else, because it’ll just make everything so much worse if you keep pining after me. We don’t want things to get worse, we want them to get better, and they can’t if you don’t move on, like the rest of us.”

Tony watched him as Clay seemed to go through an assortment of different emotions, which were clearly fighting for dominance. At last, his face settled into a tiny smile, and he opened his eyes. Meeting Tony’s, he said, “I really would like to raise money to refurbish the other movie theatres.”

Tony managed a grin, relieved. “That’s a good start.”

They talked for a while about different ways Clay could go about that. The money for the Hannah Project fund had been given away to charities for people like Hannah, as it should have been, and so they would need to start from scratch. 

Tony, however, was pleased to see that Clay really did care a lot about the movie theatres. It was a good place for his attention to shift too, since most of it had been focused on Tony, and how he’d messed up everything with Tony. 

All about Tony. And that wasn’t healthy. The movie theatre thing, was, because at least Clay had something else to look forward to, to think about. 

When Tony left the Jensens’ home, it was with a nod in Clay’s direction. Maybe they’d get around to shaking hands, or maybe even hugging, at some point in the future, but for now, a head nod was good enough. 

When Tony was gone, Clay went up the stairs to his bedroom. He left the door open, and settled down in front of his computer. 

_ Dear Clay Jensen, _

_ Today is gonna be a good day, and here’s why: because, today… today, at least, you’re you.  _

_ And that’s the most important thing.  _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, there it is. The day dream is finally out there in the open, and I'm done with it.   
> Honestly, it's not great, and it could've been much better if I'd decided to be even the slightest bit original, but I didn't and so it is what it is.   
> I should've never given in.   
> Oh well.


End file.
